Monday, November 26, 2012

How is "One Art" aligned with the biographical critical lens?

"One Art" is a meditation on loss.  The poem's opening stanza is a single sentence: 

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.

And in that single sentence, the narrator observes that loss is an inevitability of life and that one "masters" it simply by experiencing it again and again.  The biographical critical lens assumes that Bishop is writing about her own life when she describes a series of losses in the poem.
Bishop's significant losses began early in her life. Her father died when she was less than a year old, and her mother was committed to a mental hospital when Bishop was just five. She moved around as a result, living in both Canada and the US as a child.  Her travels continued as she attended school in Massachusetts and college in upstate New York.  After college she lived in California, Florida, Europe and North Africa, as well as Brazil, with her lover Lota de Macedo Soares, an architect. Leaving behind people and homes in all those cities and countries likely aligns with the poem's expressed feeling of 

...my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

The poem's most poignant expression, when the speaker laments the loss of "you" in line sixteen in the poem's final stanza, likely refers to Lota, who took her own life in 1967.  
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/elizabeth-bishop

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