One Art

Throughout her life, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) suffered many losses. Her father died before her first birthday and her mother entered a mental institution when Bishop was only five, leaving her to the guardianship of maternal and paternal grandparents. Later, Bishop’s lover committed suicide in Brazil, prompting Bishop’s return to the US. “One Art” (1976) alludes to several of these prominent losses, though the poem objectively approaches loss. “One Art” defines loss as a special form of art capable of mastery and practice like poetry. Despite loss, or perhaps because of it, Bishop crafted tight, detailed, and descriptive poems. Her poetry resisted more expressive, contemporary literary styles like the Confessional poetry for which her best friend Robert Lowell was known.

Poet Biography

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) published roughly 100 poems during her lifetime. She garnered acclaim, even becoming poet laureate of the US and earning the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, but it wasn’t until after her death that critics truly began realizing her impact on American poetry. Bishop chose quality over quantity, which is why she didn’t publish as consistently as other poets of her time. She preferred revision and exactitude, precision and attention to detail; one critic likened her crafted poems to watching intricate mobiles spin.

Bishop’s father died before she turned one-year-old. Bishop’s maternal grandparents took her in when her mother, who suffered from mental illness, entered a mental institution when Bishop was five. Her life drastically changed—again—when her wealthy paternal grandparents became guardians and afforded her a life of privilege. Bishop attended Vassar College where she befriended poet Marianne Moore. She traveled the world after graduation and published her first collection of poetry, North and South (1946). Her second collection, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (1955), earned the Pulitzer Prize. While living in Brazil in 1967, Bishop’s lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, committed suicide. Bishop returned to the US after this loss and began teaching. She won a National Book Award and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. It was only toward the end of her life that her poetry began garnering the lasting praise for which it’s now known. “The Armadillo” and “One Art” are two of her most well-known works. Bishop was also a painter, a translator, and a fiction writer; much of this work posthumously went into publication.

Poem Text

Bishop, Elizabeth. "One Art." 1976. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The first stanza introduces the poem’s subject: loss. Bishop contends “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (Line 1), while considering how lost items seemingly contain an “intent” (Line 2) to disappear. This intent, says Bishop, clearly shows that loss itself is nothing major.

In the second stanza, Bishop suggests mastering loss every day by losing things like time and keys. The third stanza ups the ante by introducing larger types of loss: Bishop recommends losing “places, and names, and where it was you meant / to travel” (Lines 10-11). These items won’t feel so much like loss if the reader is already practicing daily loss.

Bishop mentions in the fourth stanza how easily she has lost things—including her mother’s watch and houses she loved. She continues with personal loss in the fifth stanza admitting she has lost “two cities […] / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent” (Lines 17-18). Though she misses these lost items, she still doesn’t equate loss with “disaster” (Line 19), something she repeatedly warns the reader not to equate with loss.

In the final stanza, Bishop admits that, though she has lost someone, and this fact is hard to write, she continues to hold that loss is not disastrous.