Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994. Print.

Contents:

“When Elizabeth Bishop’s letters are published (as they will be), she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but also one of the most prolific writers of our century.” -Robert Lowell

The titular poem “One Art” refers to the art of writing, as well as to the art of losing: losing innocence, losing time, losing ability. Bishop reflected on and changed many of her poems before sending them off for publication. Her letters, on the other hand, were never meant to be formally published. In a letter to her friend Kit Barker, she remarked, “I am sorry for people who can’t write letters. But I suspect also that you and I, Ils, love to write them because it’s kind of like working without really doing it.” Her letters in One Art: Letters and those to Robert Lowell in Words in Air (a phrase taken from Lowell’s poem to Bishop in “For Elizabeth Bishop 4”) are raw and unaltered.

The book is organized as follows:

• Introduction written by Robert Giroux

• Chronology

• [ONE] 1926--1936: School, Vassar, New York, Europe

• [TWO] 1937--1945: Key West, Europe, New York

• [THREE] 1948--1951: North & South, Main, Hamm (?), Yaddo, Washington

• [FOUR] 1952--1967: Brazil, A Cold Spring, Seattle, Questions of Travel, New York

• [FIVE] 1968--1979: San Francisco, Ouro Preto, Cambridge, Geography III, North Haven, Lewis Wharf

Previous Publication:

The excerpt from Mary McCarthy is used with permission from the McCarthy Literary Trust.

The excerpt of Robert Lowell’s letter is used with permission from his estate.

“One Art” originally appeared in Geography III.

Critical Reaction:

“‘One Art’ not only effects such poetic reversals but exposes them as affected. Bishop's choice of a villanelle, a traditional form of repetition that promises to make "art" out of "losing," seems to support the opening assertion, but the negatives cast doubt on the project at the outset. Yet the title tells us that the art of writing and the art of losing are one, and the requirements of the form serve to render loss certain from the start. The third line already gives us the last word of the poem-the word she means to deny but is fated to write.Writing and losing are one art because the formal repetition of loss, which promises mastery, simultaneously finalizes disaster: "(Write it!) like disaster." Repetition duplicates and divides, both masters and loses, and thus makes for "disaster." The division-by-duplication of the "aster" is the ill star that governs poets.”

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

“The letters show a continuity with the character presented in Bishop's poems: apparently, she really was a brilliant, modest and kind person. They also show the poet's eye and ear for detail (``Someone asked my landlord . . . if he didn't have an `author' living in his house, and he replied, `No, not an author, a writer' ''). There is also a disarming, even dogged sense of humor, striking given the fact that much in the letters is dark: the poet's struggles against alcoholism, loneliness and a 15-year relationship that ended in the suicide of her lover, Lota Soares. Bishop's correspondence may have been a bulwark against emptiness; the letters engage the reader not with startling revelations, but with everyday acts of courage.”

Publisher’s Weekly. April. http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-22640-4