The Individual and the Mass

The Particular Against the Abstract

Cummings’s formal innovations — the lowercase letters, the fractured syntax, the unpredictable line breaks — are not mere playfulness but a sustained argument against the tyranny of convention. Convention, in Cummings’s world, is what the mass imposes on the individual: the standardization of language, thought, and feeling that makes people interchangeable units rather than irreducible persons.

His theology of the individual is the doctrine of the imago Dei expressed in the language of Romantic individualism. Every human being is irreducibly particular, made in the image of a God who is himself particular rather than abstract. The mass that Cummings attacks is the serpent’s work in its modern, bureaucratic, mechanized form: the reduction of the image-bearing person to a unit of production and consumption.

What i carry your heart Reveals

The poem “i carry your heart with me” is Cummings at his most straightforwardly lyrical — a love poem that asserts, with the confidence of a man who has staked everything on it, that the love between two people participates in something larger than either of them: “here is the deepest secret nobody knows / (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life).”

This is not merely romantic hyperbole. It is a claim about the nature of love: that the love between two people, at its deepest, participates in the love that is the root of the root of existence. Augustine would recognize the structure of this claim.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the woman presses against the serpent’s work in its many forms. In Cummings’s world, the serpent’s work takes the form of the mass, the machine, and the convention that crush the particular, the living, and the free.

His poetry is a sustained celebration of what the serpent’s work tries to destroy: the spring, the individual, the particular, the loving. His lowercase “i” is not self-deprecation but a refusal of the capital I of abstract selfhood in favor of the concrete, embodied, particular self that God made and loves. In this refusal he participates, without knowing it, in the seed of the woman’s work: the insistence that the image of God is present in every irreducible particular human being, and cannot be standardized away.

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