Resurrection to Zenith (2)----on "l(a"

                                                                  FOREWORD
Introduce myself first:My name is Charles. I am a fresher with no girlfriends in Central South University, majoring in Electric Information, serving as Vice Grade President. playing the piano is my cup of tea. And going to gym is my cup of coffee, since I am longing to be muscular and protect my pocket money from being plundered frequently.
Next, I should talk about my personalities. Well, it is hard to say. Scrupulous, conscientious, benevolent and innocent are the words others describe me. But I do not consider them special enough as idiosyncrasies. What I reckon myself is that if you have intercourse with me, you can feel my altruistic love, even universal love for all the mankind(oh, that is  a little exaggerated, but you can still feel I am amiable.)
Actually, this is my first time writing a thesis, since my roommate Wu HaoKun and I have to make a program about poem together.    

     

                                                   Text

        My partner and I have a gargantuan appetite for challenge which emboldened us to bite the bullet to select a sparkling poetry among multifarious poems, enigmatic and esoteric. During the process, we were consumed by the blistering fire of pome’ power and frequently fell into dire financial straits, since poetry books of original edition are absolute robberies. But finally, we prevailed all the great odds and fortunately came across a special poetry of e.e. Cummings worthy of deep analysis.
     In moving on to the poem we shall investigate claims that Cummings' experimental work, like Mallarmé's, provokes a crisis in language by showing the unstable and undecidable relations between meanings, between meaning and form, and between different grammatical categories. Derrida claims that this crisis is as a result of the "logic of language and not an aberrant distortion of it." Furthermore, that the crisis is both new— "we are still developing critical methods adequate to it"—and very old—as old as Plato and Aristotle. The poem under discussion is "l(a":
l(a
le 


af


fa
ll
s)


one


l
iness


     This haiku-like poem has been described as the "most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings ever created" (Kennedy, Dreams 463). Consisting of just four words, which the poem splits into two distinct phrases— "loneliness," and "a leaf falls"—the poem has generated a wide range of critical analysis. The connection between the two phrases seems at first tenuous. The falling of a leaf is a concrete act, whilst the word "loneliness" is an abstract concept.
      Rushworth Kidder, who described the poem as a "brief description of autumn," states that "the single leaf falling is a metaphor for both physical and spiritual isolation" (200-201). Barry Marks, in a highly detailed reading, asks the reader to hold the two phrases simultaneously together so that various possibilities emerge--— "it [the poem] asks us to look at the printed page" (Marks 23). The form of the poem does indeed foster an attitude of internalisation, of drawing attention to itself as an artifact, a work of art. To begin with, the poem dribbles down the page, at once suggesting the descent of a falling leaf, whilst also visually resembling the figure "1", or a vertical stroke on a page. The reader's progress is slowed down by the shattered syntax, and the reader's eye is forced into a similar movement as that when watching a descending leaf, both finally coming to a rest on the "ground" ("iness"—the longest and last line).
     Undeniably, Critics play a significant role in enhancing public’s aesthetic appreciation. Those people’s views helped us a lot to understand Cummings. Actually, most artists are detached from the mundane world, precluding them from interpreting whimsical and transient ideas to the public. However, it should be confessed that HB are in possession of innate sensitivity to the aesthetics, though this sensitivity is shackled to a certain extent due to the lack of special training.
     Anyway, art critics enhanced our appreciation of "l(a". Their trenchant comments endowed us with unique insight into the particularity, originality，and ingenuity of the artistic works.
     Inheriting previous vies, we allege that "Loneliness is like a falling leaf," or "The feeling of loneliness is the feeling a man gets when he watches a single leaf falling."The poem indicates that autumn and the autumn of a man's life—death is a lonely business.
     Loneliness can’t be more normal in morden society. Although the advancement of modern technology dramatically and magically enhance our efficiency，it doesn't automatically guarantee more gathering time for most people. As a remarkable writer said in his article “The word "loneliness" plays an increasingly dominant role in our daily lives.” A century ago, when productivity and efficiency was considerably lower than that of today, people seemed to boast more leisure time with others for the sake of being more easily satisfied by wealth and social expectation. However, this hundred yeas witnessed the transformation from the years of "smelling flowers together" to ages of "cutting things fine by oneself".
     In this highly civilized society, “intimate neighbors” is only a term appears in urban myth. In reality, the requirement and pressure from the society, our family, and ourselves urge us to invest our free time privately into upgrading our public reputation, career position, and living condition in order to keep our competitiveness. Consider, for example, a business man would rather spend his “free time” in bidding for new business than take a vacation; a student......; a professor....... Thus, like solitarily accelerating gyroscopes, modern people are driven much busier than they were.
     To conclude, Cummings' poem supports Derrida's radical conclusion that since all the words in this poem can be decomposed, there are no more words. This has relevant implications in the current post-modern debate about systems of signification, especially in an era where the sign can mean so many things (life styles, wealth, or even social status). Cummings' work, in using different fields of representation, disrupts conventional thinking about representation, and it is as if Cummings were exploring the limits, not just of language, but of the problems of representation in general. Art is artificial: it is no "transparent window" showing universal truths and realities, and the construction of poems such as "l(a" is an obvious rejection of art as a transparent medium.



Works Cited

Cohen, Milton M. PoetandPainter: The Aesthetics of E. E. Cummings's Early Work. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987.

Marks, Barry. E .E .Cummings. New York: Twayne, 1964.
Matthews, Timothy. Reading Apollinaire: Theories of Poetic Language. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987.
Hampshire, UK: Analysis of Two Poems by E.E.Cummings