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    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"
    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"
    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"
    Ebook43 pages41 minutes

    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535830195
    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" - Gale

      13

      One Art

      Elizabeth Bishop

      1977

      Introduction

      One Art is a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most celebrated poets of modern America. It was included in her 1977 poetry collection Geography III, which uses thematic elements of travel, possession, and memory in pieces that are both technically precise and emotionally significant. Bishop's autobiographical details are evident throughout the collection, and in One Art, she faces the terrifying regret of lost love. She confronts this regret by giving a list of things, places, and the people they represent that she has lost in an attempt to convince herself that it is possible for her to conquer loss. Bishop uses the villanelle form to illustrate her mastery of the poetic art, but the rigid requirements of this format also provide a structure that supports the poem when her desperate hope that she can also master loss is shattered. Bishop hopes to make her poetry and loss into one unified art. The title suggests that mastery of emotion and mastery of poetic form are, at least for Bishop, inseparable.

      Bishop wrote One Art as a response to personal heartbreak, and by the end of the poem the reader knows that she is not recalling a loss she has survived but rather a loss she was living through at the moment when she was writing. A modern sense of irony is present from the first line with her declaration, by the end proven utterly false, that it is not difficult to learn how to cope with loss. Her use of the traditional and strict villanelle form and the restrained way she expresses her pain set One Art apart from the modernist, confessional poetry of many of her contemporaries. Though she had a small readership composed largely of other poets and critics for most of her career, within twenty years of her death, she was one of the most widely taught and well-known poets in America.

      Author Biography

      Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop. Her father died of Bright's disease eight months after her birth, sending her mother into a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered. Gertrude was hospitalized several times for mental disorders and institutionalized in 1916, when Bishop was five years old. Bishop never saw her again, and Gertrude died in a sanatorium in 1934.

      After her father's death, Bishop lived with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a coastal town in Canada. When she was six, she returned to live with her paternal grandparents in Worcester. They were wealthy and educated, and they wished to raise her out of the provincial lifestyle she had known

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