One Art
[3] These letters were exchanged with many influential people in her life, such as her mentor at Vassar, Marianne Moore, and her longtime friend and collaborator Robert Lowell.
The poem was written during a period of separation from her partner, Alice Methfessel, and it was one of her final works; she died three years after it was published in 1979.
Geography III and the poem within was 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.
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.
[4] Now in her sixties, Bishop's asthma had worsened and was paired with dysentery which weakened her immune system; teeth problems requiring many procedures and rheumatism made it painful and more difficult for her to walk or type.
[4] She wanted to keep up with her companion who was more than thirty years younger, and so began abusing Nembutal to sleep and Dexamyl to suppress her appetite and stabilize her mood.
"[9] Keeping to her word, Bishop heavily revised the journal entry of a first draft to remove her voice and anything specific that would give her away.
Look at the gulf between the untidy, seemingly almost useless, the first draft of Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' and the remarkably tight and suggestive final version of her nineteen-line villanelle".
[12] Like editing 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.
The second stanza sums it up with the "practice makes perfect" theme, giving examples of every day, lifelong, broad, and shallow losses.
The fourth stanza is a unique moment for Bishop, where she uses "my" and speaks of specific and personal experiences that have taught her a lesson.
[13] 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.
[14][13] The fifth stanza, and final tercet, relates back to the strong themes of traveling from her book, Geography III.
[15] A difference between the houses in the previous stanza, these cities, realms, rivers, and continents are a grander, "vaster" spectacle of her loss.
"She had lost the three houses of 'One Art' in Key West, Petrópolis, and Ouro Preto, she told David McCullough.
The poem is a villanelle, an originally French poetic form known for generally dealing with pastoral themes.
[16][17] Bishop is a known formalist in her poems, following the rules of a structure closely;[18] 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.
The villanelle has no set meter, but Bishop keeps a pattern of alternating eleven and ten-syllable lines, with predominantly iambic pentamer.
[20] 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.
Regret, more than remorse, is the general attitude and tone of this poem as Bishop recounts, or reminisces about her losses.
