One Art

"One Art" is a poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop.[1] The poem was included in her collection Geography III.[2] It is also the name of a collection of Bishop's letters.[3]

Writing

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

Content

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.

Composition

The poem is a villanelle, an originally French poetic form known for generally dealing with pastoral themes.[6][7] 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]

Reception

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

References

  1. ↑ Frankel, Joseph (25 April 2017). "Coming to Terms With Loss in Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art'". The Atlantic. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  2. ↑ Roth Pierpont, Claudia (6 March 2017). "Elizabeth Bishop's Art of Losing". The New Yorker. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  3. ↑ McClatchy, J. D. (17 April 1994). "Letters From A Lonely Poet". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Candlish Miller, Brett (1990). "Elusive Mastery: The Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"". New England Review. 13 (2): 121–129.
  5. ↑ Marshall, Megan (27 October 2016). "Elizabeth and Alice: The last love affair of Elizabeth Bishop, and the losses behind "One Art."". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2 January 2018.
  6. 1 2 Pritchard, William (2008). "Bishop's Time". The Hudson Review. 61 (2): 321–334.
  7. ↑ Preminger, Alex (1993). The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03271-8.
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