My Favorite Poet

Roger Fritts

March 2, 1997

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church

Bethesda, Maryland

Mr. Cummings’s eccentric punctuation is, I think, typical of his immatu rity as an artist. . . . It is Mr. Cummings’s theory that punctuation marks, capitalization and arrangement on the page should be used not as mere conventional indications of structure which make it easier for the reader to pay attention to the meaning conveyed by the words themselves but as independent instruments of expression susceptible of infinite variation. . . . the results which it yields are ugly. His poems are hideous on the page. He insists upon shattering even the most conventional and harmless of his productions . . . into an explosive system of fragments . . .

Edmund Wilson is not alone. Cummings often divided words on the page to the point that they are like puzzles that we must put together before we can read them. This style often evokes strong feelings. People love or hate his poetry.

I am one of those who love his writings. A man of unconventional feelings and beliefs, E.E. Cummings is my favorite poet.

•440•He took pride in the fact that he was born at home. To him the dependence on hospitals for births signaled an unfortunate depersonalization in American life. The year of his birth was 1894. The city was Cambridge, Massachusetts.•440

•440•He graduated from Harvard University able to read and speak French, German, Latin, Greek, and Italian. But all his life he despised intellectuals and wrote with fondness about clowns, waitresses, and organ grinders.•440

•440•The French imprisoned him as a spy in 1917 because he refused to answer “yes” when asked if he hated Germans.•440

•440•Some critics praise him as a great poet, but when he was forty his mother had to finance the publication of his poems after fifteen publishers turned him down.•440

•440•He hated crowds (he described the Hollywood Bowl as “an open air auditorium seating 30,000 morons”), but he made his home in the middle of Greenwich Village in Manhattan.•440

•440•He wrote with understanding and sensitivity about love, but he went through two bitter, painful divorces.•440

•440•He held only one paying job in his life and retired after three months. Most of the time he survived, just barely, on small gifts of money from family and friends. •440

cummings’ parents and his three marriages inspired much of his poetry. Although the family lived in Cambridge, his father was the minister of an important Unitarian church in Boston: South Congregational Church. From the weekly sermons of his father, he learned the values of New England Unitarianism—a mixture of liberal theology and conservative social behavior. As a young man cummings rebelled against these conservative social standards. The conflict reached a head one evening when he borrowed his father’s car, which had the word clergy clearly printed on the back near the plates. Later that night the Boston police found the car illegally parked in front of a brothel. The story made thenewspapers. cummings later tried to put himself in his father’s shoes and see things from his perspective. He wrote a letter he imagined his father might write:

When you went to college we began not to understand you. You fuddled your mind with tobacco, altho’ I gave you the benefit of my experience on the subject. You refused to promise not to indulge in alcohol, thereby breaking your mother’s heart. You evaded all my entreaties to go to the gymnasium to make your body strong. You took less and less personal care of yourself, tho’ I assured you of what everybody knows, namely that a man is judged by his appearance. Finally you picked your friends un wisely, tho’ a man’s companions are a criterion of his tastes.

In spite of the tensions, years after his father’s death cummings wrote a romantic sketch of him in which he described his father as a crack shot, a famous flyfisherman, a sailor, a woodsman, a canoeist, a photographer, a painter, a carpenter, an architect, a plumber, a teacher, and, he wrote

a preacher who announced during the last war that the Gott Mit Uns boys were in error since the only thing which mattered was for man to be on God’s side (& one beautiful Sunday in Spring remarked from the pulpit that he couldn’t understand why anyone had come to hear him on such a day) & horribly shocked his pewholders by crying “the Kingdom of Heaven is no spiritual roofgarden: it’s inside you”

And cummings wrote that his “father’s voice was so magnificent that he was called on to impersonate God speaking from Beacon Hill . . .”

e. e. cummings was much more like his mother than his father. She did not care for fashion and believed in comfort in her clothes. She did not cook, she did not sew, and she had great difficulty with the household accounts; her son adopted all these traits. But although his mother was weak in practical responsibilities, she felt her life experiences deeply. She took great pleasure in a colorful sunset, a kind act, and a child’s achievement. And she was deeply committed to her family and to a few close friends; her son also adopted all these traits.

About his mother he wrote:

She assured me that she grew up a shy—or (as we now say) neurotic—girl; who had to be plucked from under sofas whenever friends came to call . . . Whereas my father had created his Unitarianism (his own father being a Christian of the hellfire variety) she had inherited hers; it was an integral part of herself, she expressed it as she breathed and as she smiled. The two indispensable factors in life, my mother always maintained, were “health and a sense of humor.” And although her health eventually failed her, she kept her sense of humor to the beginning.

The family owned a farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Rev. Cummings would preach for nine months of the year in Boston and then take his family to spend the three summer months at the farm. When cummings’s father retired from the ministry, they visited the country more often. In November of 1926, driving to New Hampshire, his mother and father encountered a sudden snow storm, which cut visibility.

cummings described what happened next:

. . . a locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When the two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman stand ing—dazed but erect—beside a mangled machine; with blood “spouting” (as the older said to me) out of her head. . . . These two men took my sixty-six-year-old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father’s body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.

She lived on until 1947. The minister read a poem by her son at the memorial service. It recalls a rose garden at the family home in Cambridge in which his mother took special pride. However, the poem is more than a memory of the past. It is a Unitarian view of death.

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of liliesofthevalley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose

tall like a rose)

standing near my

swaying over her

(silent)

with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which

is a flower and not a face with

hands

which whisper

This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

In December of 1919, cummings’s first and only child was born, a beautiful baby girl named Nancy. There was only one problem: the mother of the child, Elaine Thayer, was married not to cummings, but to cummings’ best friend. Eventually a divorce occurred. cummings married Elaine in a small private service conducted by his father. He legally adopted Nancy. For Elaine he composed the finest erotic poem he ever wrote:

I like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite new a thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

I like your body. I like what it does,

I like its hows. I like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones, and the trembling

firmsmooth ness and which I will

again and again and again

kiss, . . .

cummings was thirty years old at the time of his first marriage. He loved to play with his daughter; he delighted in taking her to the Central Park Zoo, or to the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store. He made up stories for her which she found delightful. But he had no job, and his only income was a small monthly check sent by his parents. He lived in a cheap apartment in Greenwich Village, in New York City. He ate all his meals in restaurants, he stayed up past midnight in conversation with friends and he seldom rose before noon. After a few months this lifestyle, Elaine demanded a divorce and refused to let him see Nancy. Although he was in love with his bohemian existence, cummings was also in love with his wife and child. Deeply depressed by the divorce, he carried a revolver around with him for months, considering suicide.

He overcame his depression by marrying a second time. The place was All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. The bride was a beautiful woman named Ann Bordon. Unfortunately for cummings, she was a heavy drinker. She passed out from drinking before the wedding and the wedding party could barely revive her in time for the ceremony. After three stressful years she also divorced cummings and married a wealthy doctor. Of his grief cummings later wrote:

If I am losing, become separated from, some deep spiritual influ ence—represented perhaps by a parent or relative, perhaps by a girl with whom I’ve been (& cannot even suspect that I am not still) entirely inlove—I suffer torments: the loss, the separation, is intolerable: every moment of my experience is a new & differing agony to me, & the sum of these agonies equals the mystery of being born. But sooner or later . . . it suddenly occurs to me that this very experience was the most fortunate of my life: then (& only then does the curse wonderfully become a blessing, the disappearance an emergence, the agonizing departure an ecstatic arrival.

cummings found lasting happiness in his third marriage to Marion Morehouse. Twelve years younger than he, Marion was a successful model, and considered one of the most beautiful women in New York City. He wrote her:

“sweet spring is your

time is my time is our

time for springtime is lovetime

and viva sweet love”

In the last ten years of his life cummings finally could support himself as a writer. A young friend became his agent, arranged for lectures and negotiated fees. He was a superb reader of his own work, both poetry and prose. On college campuses in the 1950s he was enormously popular, often drawing standing room only crowds. The readings struck a responsive chord in the hearts of a new generation. For the first time publishers made money publishing his poems.

Yet in spite of his success he remained a deeply reserved and private man, turning down an invitation to visit President Kennedy at the White House. In the last year of his life he recorded these feelings:

I never knew anyone as shy as me—today (cold March wind; sun in&outing) as I stood . . . sketching kids inside [a play ground] became aware that . . . [a] Negro . . . (a vaguely glimpsed human darkness with sensitive eyes, sitting merely & to my right; sad & lonesome) was eagerly watching me. Instantly I stop—slam shutting my notebook & hurry away what I wanted to do was express my appreciation of his (obviously quite genuine) interest, by saying, “They’re cute, aren’t they” & nodding toward the children—but what I did was exactly the opposite & now, how I hate myself!

In September of 1962 the shy poet and his wife Marion Morehouse were staying at the cummings family farm in New Hampshire. After chopping fire wood, cummings col lapsed. Marion rushed him to a small hospital where he died of a brain hemorrhage a few hours later. He was sixty-eight years old.

He was a Unitarian poet not only because he was the son of a prominent Unitarian minister, but also because his poetry reflects our religious identity in at least three ways.

First, like us, cummings preached the gospel of individualism. cummings hated what he saw as the mass culture of America, and he hated even more what he saw of the dictator ship of communism. He felt that authority stifles the development and expression of individual being. He wrote:

To be nobody else but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

Second, like us, cummings was playful. There are critics (like Edmund Wilson) who claim that cummings never matured, never became an adult. They argue that cummings remained forever stuck in adolescence, filled with a spirit of mischief and a desire to outrage. Because of his erotic poems, he was called the naughty boy of American poetry. Critics say that his poetry enjoys its greatest popularity with undergraduates in college. This they say, is a sign of his immaturity. Some suggest his need to print his name in small letters instead of using capitals is symbolic of his desire to remain forever a child. Some point to his happygolucky style and his lack of discipline and suggest that he played the role of a child because he feared the responsibilities of adult life.

This youthful play is also part of the identity of twentieth-century Unitarian Universalism. In our congregations we take a certain joy in behaving eccentrically, unconventionally, experimentally, in comparison to most churches in our community. Some will say that this is a sign that we (like cummings) are immature. I prefer to think that it is a sign of our freshness and vitality. This childish spirit is expressed in a poem by cummings about a bird:

May my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

Third, like us, cummings preached the value of the natural, physical world. This worship of the natural world was central to nineteenth-century Unitarian Transcendentalists. Today it remains a central part of our religious identity. cummings’ erotic poems are part of this expression of the joy of the natural world. The connection with the physical is also expressed in his poems about stars, trees, and birds. As we worship on this first Sunday in March, I want to close with a wonderful poem about spring.

O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

,has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty .how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggly knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
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