The common things he wrote about were usually uninteresting topics, like nature, but carried strong emotions in it that took a lot of thought and careful analyzing to get the full meaning. Even then, the reader cannot be sure what Cummings intended, because he left so much room for interpretation. Through nature, Cummings made human …show more content…
In cubism paintings, subjects were broken down into pieces for a deeper evaluation. In one of Cummings’ other poems, about a grasshopper, where the insect was hopping into view, but like “l(a”, the reader would take several tries to understand what the poem was saying (Triem). Cummings was able to linguistically create the blurred movement of the grasshopper’s path. In “l(a”, he also created that movement. He used words as a medium to create a blurred movement almost (Gerber). Relating to the visual breakdown of words, cubism was believed to be a major influence in Cummings’ work. He blurred the lines between reading and viewing through the careful placement of words and letters. Through his strange way of showing things, Cummings makes his readers think critically about his work, and then also think about what other works that seemed easy to understand (Semonsky 90). The letters throughout “l(a” fall along nine lines. Because of how much material the poem has, it cannot be defined fully as “concrete poetry” which is when a poem creates an image that relates to what the poem is about. The poem does though, create a motion where the leaf is taken back into the sky when the reader glances back to the first line in the poem to read what’s outside of the parenthesis