User:Carlykaderli/sandbox

Here lies the organization of thoughts of Carly Kaderli about the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. What follows are stacks of facts.

Original draft compared to the final (picture and citation from textbook)

[Critical Analysis . Form: Villanelle . Metre: Lineation . Punctuation . Rhyme . Intertextualization . Meaning]

“I feel profoundly bored with all the contemporary poetry except yours,—and mine that I haven’t written yet.” (about Lowell)https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/tragic-muses/521418/

INTRODUCTION TO CONVERSATIONS WITH ELIZABETH BISHOP

- "Those students are not there to 'express' themselves, they're there to learn how to write a good poem." (to Wesley Wehr)

- "She had lost the three houses of "One Art" in Key West, Petrópolis, and Ouro Prêto, she told David McCullough"

- "I always try to stick as much as possible to what really happened when I describe something in a poem," she told Wehr...

- "A group of words, a phrase, may find its way into my head like something floating in the sea, and presently it attracts other things to it." to Goerge Starbuck

Alexandra Johnson, Elizabeth Spires,

Bishop's autobiography is written in a collection of letters, from 1928 to 1979, written to and from her close friends and associates, including Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Lota Soares, and Alice Methfessel. This collection and autobiography is subsequently also titled One Art; This poem tells a story of her life and its tone and meaning is a reflection of how she saw it/felt about it at this stage in her life.

INTRODUCTION

"One Art" is a poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop^[1] about her partner Alice Methfessel, during the years they spent apart.

(I would say this poem is a self introspective moment in her life when she speaks about the places and people she has lost thus far, considering herself a master of loss.... maybe find another critic who backs this up).

Bishop's alcoholism and demanding behaviors drove a wedge in many of her relationships, professional and personal alike (LINK). One Art illustrates the losses she has faced in her life, and her steps to accepting them.

One Art exists in seventeen drafts before she settled on this villanelle, thought to be one of the very best in the English Language. It is compared to the works of W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Matthew Hittinger, Theodor Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and more (HYPER LINK VILLANELLE WIKIPIDIA AND EACH INDIVIDUAL POET'S WIKIPEDIA AND THEIR RESPECTIVE VILLANELLE)

The poem was included in her collection Geography III (1976).^[2]

It is also the name of a collection of Bishop's letters from 1928 to 1979, published as her autobiography in 1994. These letters were written to and from many influential people in her life, such as her mentor at Vassar, Marianne Moore, longtime collaborate Robert Lowell, late wife Lota Soares, and partner Alice Methfessel.

Her poem "One Art" can be considered autobiographical in nature, as it reflects the losses she has faced and her reflective outlook on her life from this stage of her life; whether she knew it or not, this would be one of her final works, and she died three years after it was published in 1979.

Writing[edit]

Bishop wrote seventeen drafts of the poem, with titles including "How to Lose Things," "The Gift of Losing Things," and "The Art of Losing Things".^[4] By the fifteenth draft, Bishop had chosen "One Art" as her title.^[5] The poem was written over the course of two weeks, an unusually short time for Bishop.^[4]

Seventeen Drafts

One comparison between the first and the final draft is where Bishop removes herself from it. Bishop's career was different from many of her colleagues, such as Robert Lowell, because she hated confessional poetry, "Besides they seldom have anything interesting to 'confess' anyway. Mostly they write about a lot of things which I should think were best left unsaid." (CITE) Keeping to her word, Bishop heavily revised the journal entry of a first draft to remove her voice and anything that would specifically give her away. For example, "exceptionally / beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person / (except for blue eyes)," changes to "(the joking voice, a gesture I love)," giving Bishop the distance she aimed for. When it was published to the New York Times, its publisher Howard Moss, responded that "One Art" was, "...upsetting and sad" and that Bishop had established, "...just the right amount of distance."

Scholars have noted many features about the intentions behind the poem by analyzing the changing features in each consecutive draft, often using this analysis in their interpretation of the final poem from its drafts. In a conversation with film editor Walter Murch, Michael Ondaatje compared the creative writing process with "One Art", "In literature, even in something as intimate as a poem, those early drafts can be just as wayward and haphazard as the early stages of a film. Look at the gulf between the untidy, seemingly almost useless, first draft of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" and the remarkably tight and suggestive final version of her nineteen-line villanelle. Just how you edit a film, Bishop laid out a sequence of her thoughts and emotions and then came back and organized it into a villanelle like putting together a puzzle. In each draft to follow, she would get closer to reaching that form, with the structure, rhymes, and refrains as her edge pieces.

While it is evident that the 'things lost' that Bishop gives in this poem are from her life, seeing her weigh other options of what to discuss illustrates Bishop's obsession with being exact in her poems. "I always try to stick as much as possible to what really happened when I describe something in a poem," she told Wesley Wehr

(talk about the specific cities and rivers)

The first draft, "How to Lose Things," "The Gift of Losing Things" was written in prose, and is a raw entry of Bishop speaking on the places she has lost, and now the person.

Some of the piece is adapted from a longer poem, Elegy, that Bishop never completed or published.^[4]

(okay that is kind of totally incorrect...)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40242261.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Acf7e07eb652134c75f5d70bcdda47d46

- Despite the fact that among these rough notes are several important words and ideas that turned up later in "One Art" - notably "gestures" and jokes and the pain of losing "things" - the villanelle does not replace that lost book-length elegy, but incorporates it. There is no doubt that the crisis behind this poem was the apparent loss to Elizabeth of Alice Methfessel, the companion, caretaker, secretary and great love of the last eight years of her life. While its method is the description of the accumulation of losses in the poet's life, its occasion and subject is the loss of Alice.

- More than once in the drafts of Bishop's published poems, one finds that she came to express in the final draft nearly the opposite of what she started out to say

- t. In the final version of that poem, Bishop describes the confluence of "two great rivers," the Tapajôs and the Amazon, an

The poem originally evaluated, as "Questions of Travel" had, the traveler's pos- sibility for "choice"; the resolution the conflux first offered was the chance to decide: "Choice - a choice! That evening one might choose," she wrote in the first draft. In the final draft, even the idea of choice has disappeared and the place offers only res- olution, as the poet lets go of her need to choose.

"Bishop conceived the poem as a villanelle from the start, and the play of "twos" within it - two rivers, two cities, the lost lover means not being "two" any more - suggests that the two-rhyme villanelle is a form appropriate to the content" - Brett Millier

Content[edit]

Bishop's life was marked by loss and instability, which is reflected in many of the poems of Geography III.^[4] "One Art" is narrated by a speaker who details losing small items, which gradually become more significant, moving, for example, from the misplacement of "door keys" to the loss of "two cities" where the speaker presumably lived.

The first stanza gives the thesis of the poem; we are all going to lose things and get much better at it as we do, so find the silver linking in that, it is not a disaster. The word "intent" gives agency to powers that be, and the "so many things" which are going to be lost.

The second tercet sums it down to the "practice makes perfect" theme, giving examples of every day, lifelong, broad, and shallow losses. These examples communicate that not only does everyone lose things, but everyone loses things all the time.

The third stanza begins the chronicle of Elizabeth's losses in life, spiraling "farther" and "faster" towards the final stanza. "Places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel" represent the theme of regret in this poem.

The fourth stanza is a unique moment for Bishop, where she uses "my" and speaks on specific and personal experiences which have taught her a lesson. The mother she speaks of here was estranged to Bishop at age five when she was permanently institutionalized, this "watch" may simply represent a keepsake she held which meant nothing to her, as she didn't feel a strong connection with her mother. She was meant to write a critical response to Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother in 1975 but, having not relating to the mother-daughter relationship Plath expresses, Bishop didn't go further with her criticism of these, which she felt were superficial. The houses she has lost are from her childhood from moving around a lot and her relationship with Methfessel; the two were connected by their travels and the time they spent living together in paradises. Specifying her "next-to-last" house to indicate that her life is not over yet, something significant because of her mental health and suicidal tendencies at this point in her life.

The fifth stanza, and final tercet, relates back to the strong themes of traveling from her book, Geography III, which this poem was published in. A difference between the houses in the previous stanza, these cities, realms, rivers, and continents are a grander, "vaster" spectacle of her loss. Scholars have discovered the exact locations she is speaking of here, which relate across the globe and periods of her life of travelling, but emphasize the period when she lived in Brazil with her longtime love Lota de Macedo Soares, an heiress of a great estate, a "realm" in Brazil. "She had lost the three houses of "One Art" in Key West, Petrópolis, and Ouro Prêto, she told David McCullough"

The final quatrain in the final mention of the subject of Bishop's present loss, and reveals that the purpose in writing this poem is personal healing and growth. Mentioned in the Writing section of this article, Bishop kept a balance between distancing herself from a poem written about her life, and the "joke voice" mentioned here is the sole physical trait of reference to Bishop's lost partner. The parentheses and slight description give an insight to what Bishop is thinking about while writing the poem. This is a crucial element of the stanza because of the next parenthetical pause: again expressing that "the art of losing's not too hard to master" (a moment when the refrain deviates from "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), Bishop interrupts the line to remind herself to "(Write it!)" and remind herself of the message which she is preaching.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

This is essentially the thesis of the poem; we are all going to lose things and get much better at it as we do, so find the silver linking in that, it is not a disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

This is where she sums it down to, "practice makes perfect", giving examples of broad and shallow losses. "Accept the fluster" and relate that this is something not only everyone does, but everyone does constantly. If we didn't turn the other cheek, we would feel the constant weight of grief and regret.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

Bishop reveals a lot of the context of the poem in this stanza; she is speaking from experience, as she has suddenly lost father and faster. In relation to Alice Methfessel, she has lost the places they used to share, the names of her loved ones, and their future in traveling came to an abrupt end. The line "None of these will bring disaster." is foreboding at this point, for she will just be losing farther and faster, and maybe deeper now.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The mother she speaks of here was estranged to Bishop at age five when she was permanently institutionalized, this "watch" may simply represent a keepsake she held which meant nothing to her, as she didn't feel a real connection with her mother. She was meant to write a critical response to Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother in 1975 but, having not relating to the mother-daughter relationship Plath expresses, Bishop didn't go further with these, which she felt superficially. (ELIZABETH AND ALICE THE NEW YORKER)

Even in her original drafts, Bishop speaks of losing these houses; obviously a point of fixation and reflection for Bishop at the time. Her early life was so that she was constantly losing a home when she moved to a different relative's house. Now her homes with Methfessel are threatened, and it was where they both lived that they met, so she is triggered by this area in her life.

-

Traveling was a constant in Bishop's life. Starting at a young age with a dismantled household, Bishop got used to moving around a lot. She cherishes her vacations with Methfessel, where she stayed in gorgeous homes and memorized the names of all the flowers she saw.

-

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Bishop's two cities are likely in America or at least the Pacific Northwest. (FIND OUT) The realms she owned may refer to the estate her and her partner Lota De Macedo Soares had in Brazil; two rivers, a continent, are the recounted travels in South America, where she spent so much of her mid to late life.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The power behind this last stanza is pretty grand for Bishop, who was never much one for sharing personal issues through art. Losing Methfessel, who she was infatuated with. This is where she breaks face in the poem, showing humility to the very forces she is encouraging you to go against; guilt, grief, remorse. She differs here in her wording, saying the art of losing's not too hard to master. (WRITTEN IN NOTES SOMETHING ABOUT IT)

"(Write it!)" is a message to Bishop, from Bishop. She is learning from these struggles, and is mastering them herself.

talk about how "one art" got its title, and move through each line and stanza to talk about the symbols and meaning of content

like the mothers watch, which is somewhat puzzling after hearing her mothers story. maybe "I lost my mother's watch" meant "I lost my mother in time" or something deep

Themes

Bishop instills one main theme in this poem, loss, which has consequences which form branching themes of learning, regret, and travel.

Loss

Nearly explicitly stated, Bishop writes to explore the theme of loss as she reflects on her own personal losses. Using the villanelle form, Bishop emphasizes the inevitability of loss when she sets up a rigid structure, and then repeatedly breaks it, adding hyper-beats or eliding syllables, using half-rhymes, and an altered final refrain, to name a few. CITE WHO TALKED ABOUT THE FORM AND BREAKING IT Loss is felt in this poem through Bishop's vague, but not so vague, examples of things everyone loses or has the capacity to love; loss becomes a moment in the grander commentary on human existence which art pursues. This concept draws back to the title, loss is an art and the art of losing is learned through loss, engrained in every day life and present in the most important moments of our lives. This is exactly the progression that the poem follows, and it acts as a philosophical theory of life and loss, drawing examples from her life.

Learning

What satisfies and consoles Bishop in this process of writing, as well as losing, is that she is learning and enhancing a skill, the skill of loss. It's just as the saying goes, "practice makes perfect". This theme is almost an antithesis of the theme of regret, and is the main take away from this lesson on lessons of loss. The objectivity in the phrase, "The art of losing isn't hard to master," lends itself to the lesson Bishop is trying to convey; if a teacher used language that indicated bias, their entire lesson becomes compromised. The intricacies of teaching and learning are felt as deeply as loss, and Bishop's poem frames each of them as an art, the art of losing, and learning to lose.

Regret

Regret, more than remorse, is the general attitude and tone of this poem as she recounts, or reminisces her losses. Regret is naturally an antagonist to learning and growing from experiences of failure, and it behaves similarly to the experiences Bishop mentions here. The line "I miss them, but it was't a disaster," speaks strongly to this theme.

Travel

Traveling was a staple of importance to Bishop, and it inspired much of her writing before "One Art" Therefore, she promotes traveling in "One Art", even though it is a source of loss. She uses traveling as a theme here to promote a sense of carpe diem, seize the day, which relates back to repeated notions that everything is bound, or intent, to be lost that you should not shy away from anything in fear of losing it, losing it is not a disaster.

Form

The poem is a villanelle, an originally French poetic form known for generally dealing with pastoral themes.^[6][7] Bishop is a known formalist in her poems, following the rules of a structure closely; though the final stanza ironically breaks from the format, and our expectations, using parenthesis, italics, an em-dash, and a deviation in the wording of the refrain. Brad Leithauser wrote of the poem that, in addition to "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas, that it "...might have taken the elaborate stanzaic arrangement even if the Italians hadn't invented it three hundred years ago."^[6]

The ABA rhyme scheme "One Art" alternates between the "-er" and "-ent" ending sound, with the last stanza repeating the A sound, as is with the villanelle. The refrains, "The art of losing isn't hard to master", which varies in the eighteenth line, "the art of losing's not too hard to master". The villanelle has no set meter, but Bishop keeps a pattern of alternating eleven and ten syllable lines, with predominantly iambic pentamer.

In an interview with Elizabeth Spires in 1978, Bishop said that her thoughts when writing "One Art" were always on villanelles. "I wanted to write a villanelle all my life but I never could. I'd start them but for some reason I never could finish them." You can see this intent when examining the original drafts where one can make out the skeleton of a villanelle; she chose her rhymes and refrains first and filled in the rest Brett Millier has assessed that,"Bishop conceived the poem as a villanelle from the start, and the play of "twos" within it - two rivers, two cities, the lost lover means not being "two" any more - suggests that the two-rhyme villanelle is a form appropriate to the content."

Here Is where you can talk about the form and shit. what makes it a villanelle and why is it significant that it is a villanelle

Something puzzling is Bishop saying that she always wanted to write a villanelle but didn't know how. It seems that the villanelle came first and she kind of filled it in. Someone talked about her drafts and how she quickly wrote the bones of a villanelle, deciding on her rhymes and the lineation and using it to organize her thoughts in prose. Was the villanelle inspired by the early drafts or were the early drafts inspired by a villanelle?

Reception[edit]

Brett Miller wrote that "One Art" "may be the best modern example of a villanelle..." along with Theodore Roethke's "The Waking".

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/oneart.htm

Mutlu Konuk Blasing

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RESEARCH

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/drafts.htm

Although its method is the description of the accumulation of losses in the poet's life, its occasion is the loss of Alice.

(about the ending "Write It!" )the feeling that in the course of writing or saying the poem the poet is giving herself a lesson, in waking, in losing. Bishop's lines share her ironic tips for learning to lose and to live with loss.

The poem originally evaluated, as "Questions of Travel" had, the traveler's possibility for "choice"; the resolution the conflux first offered was the chance to decide: "Choice—a choice! That evening one might choose," she wrote in the first draft. In the final draft, even the idea of choice has disappeared and the place offers only resolution, as the poet lets go of her need to choose.

Bishop told an interviewer that after years of trying to write in that form, the poem just came to her. "I couldn't believe it—it was like writing a letter" (Spires 1981, p. 64).

https://bluedragonfly10.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/one-art-the-writing-of-loss-in-elizabeth-bishop%E2%80%99s-poetry/#_ftn1

It became so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost. She was stuck on the word meant for 15 drafts and sent the final version to the publisher with the awkward meant line. And then, maybe because she had let go of the poem, a way to use the word intent came to her.

When a poet finds the right form for a poem, the tuning fork of the poem sounds right to the ear. The poem has a certain balance it wouldn’t have otherwise. By the second draft of this poem it is starting to look like a villanelle. She had the repeating lines marked out and possible end words scribbled in. In her writing of it then through the various drafts, she remained curious about the poem. She wasn’t stifled by the form.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/elizabeth-bishop-and-alice-methfessel-one-art

Unlike Bishop, who was “morbidly given to borrowing trouble & expecting the worst,” Methfessel confined her anxieties to “things I can actively do something about.”

Still, Bishop worried. She dreamt that they met by chance in a foreign airport, but had only three hours together before catching separate planes.

In late March, Bishop had “two collapses, one on top of the other”—alcohol binges in quick succession, and failed to write to Methfessel for more than two weeks.

“I’d be a wreck without you,” Bishop told Methfessel, and it seemed to be true. Collapses were nearly inevitable when Methfessel was away or Bishop spent weeks or months alone in Ouro Prêto. Alcohol wasn’t the only problem. Bouts of asthma and recurrent dysentery, contracted in Brazil, weakened her system and made her susceptible to colds and flu; her teeth bothered her and required extractions, root canals, and bridges; rheumatism made walking or typing painful at times. She endured a series of weekly cortisone injections, for allergies, only to find they’d aggravated her tendency to anemia. And she’d grown reliant on a combination of Nembutal for sleep and Dexamyl (“pep-up cheer-up pills”) to lift her spirits and dull her appetite. Bishop didn’t want to risk losing Methfessel’s interest by putting on pounds—“my age and physical decay” were bad enough. Metrecal was a staple, cigarettes a habit, and when Dexamyl was withdrawn from the market as a diet drug, she persuaded Dr. Warren Wacker, at Harvard’s University Health Services, to continue prescribing the stimulant as an energy booster to ward off melancholy.

Yet Bishop was drinking to the point of collapse, even with Methfessel nearby. Her apologies and vows to reform, passionately expressed, had become predictable and unconvincing, almost worse than not saying she was sorry: “Please forgive me for being such a mess sometimes, Alice,” “I wish I had as much self-discipline as you have,” “I am going to try to respect myself a little more, honestly,” “I am sorrry—terribly sorry.”

I wish I’d been able to write more and better poems these last few years,” Bishop told Methfessel in the October letter, “and poems for you. Well, who knows, something may come along.” And something did. “One Art” began with a prose-heavy first draft

Then, as in her first draft, the stakes escalated, “losing farther, losing faster,” and the losses mounted: my mother’s watch, three beloved houses, two cities, two rivers, a continent. “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”

As late as draft eleven, the loss of Methfessel still registered in the poem’s concluding stanza as the one misfortune Bishop could not withstand: “My losses haven’t been too hard to master / with this exception (Say it!) this disaster.”

By draft fifteen, the poem had acquired its title. Bishop had been practicing the art of losing since infancy; art had become her one means of mastery. “One Art” was the elegy she had wanted for so long to write.

- so bishop was really depressed and was constantly contemplating suicide and writing to alice about it.... its unclear but i think she made an attempt and had to go to the hospital

- she continued writing to methfessel about her instructions on how to kill her humanely so she wouldn't suffer death, and where to cremate and bury her, etc. methfessel was supposed to marry a guy named peter but changed her mind. Maybe she didn't really want to marry him but wanted to please her republican parents, The New Yorker doesn't know. methfessel picked bishop up from the airport one day and they never separated again until bishop died in 1976.

Bishop had instructed Methfessel in her will to remove anything “incriminating” from her papers, explaining, “I am old-fashioned and believe in discretion & privacy.”

Bishop had instructed Methfessel in her will to remove anything “incriminating” from her papers, explaining, “I am old-fashioned and believe in discretion & privacy.”

Methfessel found Bishop on the floor of her bedroom where she’d been dressing for dinner. There was no mistaking this collapse for a drunken fall. Bishop was dead of a cerebral aneurysm.

This was the “age of poet-teachers,” Lowell had once said, but Bishop wasn’t one of them. Her poetic gift had come to her early in a time of need, and she had nurtured it as it had nurtured her, not in the classroom but in solitude—in libraries and apartments in New York, in Florida and Brazil, and now in a “new home, alone, and on the ocean,” as Lowell described her Lewis Wharf apartment. How could she advise students to do otherwise?

- alright so this is sticking you, just write something fancy and then make it more objective and relate it to the poem after more research

The relationship that Bishop is missing when she writes One Art is one straight out of a fairy tale. She met her partner at Harvard University, partying with the varsity boys who shared a dormitory with the soon to retire Bishop, who had taken over friend and collaborator's teaching position, and Alice Methfessel, the house secretary. Bishop often wrote about her and features her blue eyes in her poem "Breakfast Song" (LINK) Though Bishop was more than thirty years her senior, Methfessel fell in love with her, and would consistently show her devotion to this woman who she admired; she even had the brick of an apartment next to a bakery freshly painted for her by the boys at Harvard when she returned to Cambridge, where she stayed to enjoy the change of seasons and the flowers outside her window.

Methfessel gave everything for Bishop, who in turn guided her through the start of her young career. They lived in a vacation most of the time, but during their time apart, and when she was feeling low, Bishop turned to binge drinking. Her alcoholism, paired with her abuse of various medications to keep her energized and youthful, was a major strain on their relationship. After five years, Methfessel left Bishop and started a new relationship. The two remained impassioned friends, and wrote frequent letters to each other. Methfessel remained Bishop's sole beneficiary in death, aside from her library (CITE), which she was constantly anticipating. Bishop's relationship with death was marked with a multitude of suicides from loved ones and colleagues, and she became someone obsessed with the notion for herself. She instructed Methfessel that, if her health was ever to a certain point, that she was to humanely assist in her suicide (CITE).

INTRODUCTION

"One Art" is a poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop, originally publish in The New Yorker magazine's 1976. In the same year, Bishop included it in her book, Geography III, which includes other works of hers such as "In the Waiting Room", "The Moose", and "One Art". It is considered to be one of the best villanelles in the English Language, and is compared to the works of W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Matthew Hittinger, Theodor Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and more

It shares the title of a collection of Bishop's letters from 1928 to 1979, published as her autobiography in 1994. These letters were written to and from many influential people in her life, such as her mentor at Vassar, Marianne Moore and longtime collaborate Robert Lowell. Her poem "One Art" can be considered autobiographical in nature, as it reflects the losses she has faced and her reflective outlook on her life from this stage of her life; whether she knew it or not, this would be one of her final works, and she died three years after it was published in 1979.

Written in a period of separation from her partner, Alice Methfessel, Bishop writes of learning about loss, using lessons which map out her losses throughout her life, synthesizing at this one current loss. Still healing, Bishop's confessional is a raw outlook on heartbreak and its publication is Bishop's platform on heartbreak and how to overcome it.

After grappling with several drafts of this poem, Bishop states that this perfect villanelle finally just came to her, "I couldn't believe it -- it was like writing a letter." Bishop made sure to include "One Art" in her book, Geography III, which she had been working on for some years. The book and the poem within were met with positive critical reviews and awards; in 1976 and the years following, she received both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the "Books Abroad"/ Neusdadt International Prize for Literature and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

BACKGROUND

This poem recounts all the significant losses that Bishop has faced in her life, dating back to the death of her father at eight months old and subsequent loss of her grieving mother, who was permanently submitted to a mental asylum at five years old. Her move from Worcester, Massachusetts to Nova Scotia was the first of many, as her health and upbringing was debated by members across her family. She escaped the drag and tumultuous north, using her father's inheritance money to travel to Key West, Florida. In 1951, she travelled to Brazil on a traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College, where she met Lota de Macedo Soares and remained there with her for nearly seventeen years, until Soares committed suicide in 1967.

In 1970, she accepted Robert Lowell's invitation to take over his teaching position for a few semesters at Harvard University, before her upcoming retirement. Though hesitant at first to return to America, and college life, Bishop was eager to leave the estate of her recently deceased partner, and her inheritance was running out. Bishop lived on campus in the Kirkland House, where she met the twenty-seven year old house secretary Alice Methfessel. Methfessel helped her adjust to her new life, and the two grew close very quickly, developing an intimate relationship.

Bishop's life, and specifically her relationships with these women, was kept under wraps. At one point, Bishop instructed Methfessel to destroy any evidence of their relationship, saying "I am old-fashioned and believe in discretion and privacy." She would refer to Methfessel as her secretary or friend, and often times she was mistaken for Bishop's caregiver which, in a sense, she was. Now in her sixties, Bishop's asthma had worsened and was now paired with dysentery which weakened her immune system, teeth problems requiring many procedures, and rheumatism which made it painful and more difficult to walk or type. She wanted so much to keep up with her companion, more than thirty years younger than her, and she began abusing Nembutal to sleep and Dexamyl to suppress her appetite and stabilize her mood. Methfessel not only oversaw her medications, she helped keep Bishop organized and active in her daily activities and in her career.

Bishop and Methfessel travelled the globe together, and their relationship thrived for five years until Bishop's behaviors and alcoholism drove a wedge between them. In the spring of 1975, Methfessel had met someone else and was engaged to be married, however the two did not cease correspondence. Methfessel was written in Bishop's will to inherit almost all of her wealth and property and instructed to carry out an assisted suicide should Bishop's health reach a certain point.

In October of 1975, she started writing "One Art". Her first draft, "How to Lose Things/?/The Gift of Losing Things" "The Art of Losing Things" was a prose heavy confessional depicting what she has lost and how it can be a lesson. The final draft "One Art" is a much more distanced and structured chronicle of the losses in her life which have taught her a lesson, and a very present loss she is facing and learning from. In the following year, the villanelle was published April 26, 1976 issue of The New Yorker and her book Geography III, which was years in the making and satisfied the elegy she always intended to write.

In the years to come, Bishop would find Methfessel again and spend her remaining years in her company until her death from brain aneurysm in 1979.

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Fortunately, the letters were not destroyed and resurfaced in 2010 to reveal even more about this great poet's life and the relationship behind "One Art".

Over thirty years younger than her esteemed partner, Methfessel appeared to be some kind of caregiver to Bishop which, in a sense, she was. Bishop's health was still a major obstacle in her life, and by her sixties her asthma and eczema called for some heavy medications, which were paired with a history of smoking, alcoholism, dental issues, and more. While Methfessel helped keep her organized and active, the pressure of their age difference led Bishop to start abusing some of her medications to try and keep up, and her binge drinking got worse.

Methfessel cared for her to a point of dependency, both emotionally and physically. (REWORD AND ELABORATE) She was responsible for many medications, cortisone injections, mood and energy boosters, appetite suppressors, and more which were meant to make her look and behave younger, like Methfessel. She wrote in her will and in letters her request for Methfessel to take responsibility of these and end her life if her condition became so dire.

In October, 1975, Bishop began writing for "One Art" which took her just over two weeks and seventeen drafts to complete.

Her talk of suicide did not cease, even after the publication and good reception of "One Art".

time apart : letters

time together: that one poem about methfessel

Content

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Here lies the thesis of the poem; there are so many things you are going to lose in life, that you will get so good at losing that each loss won't feel so bad.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Here she continues, practice makes perfect. Starting with small, superficial, and completely relatable losses, she points out that not only does everyone lose things, but everyone loses things all the time.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

"Losing farther, faster" here, Bishop vaguely describes some monumental losses in her life; the places and names represent experiences and people that we can't get back, and then "where it was you meant to travel" represents the experiences we won't get to lose.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

The mother she speaks of here was estranged to Bishop at age five when she was permanently institutionalized, this "watch" may simply represent a keepsake she held which meant nothing to her, as she didn't feel a real connection with her mother. She was meant to write a critical response to Sylvia Plath's letters to her mother in 1975 but, having not relating to the mother-daughter relationship Plath expresses, Bishop didn't go further with these, which she felt superficially. (ELIZABETH AND ALICE THE NEW YORKER)

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Traveling was a constant in Bishop's life. Starting at a young age with a dismantled household, Bishop got used to moving around a lot. She cherishes her vacations with Methfessel, where she stayed in gorgeous homes and memorized the names of all the flowers she saw.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.