Loss In Elizabeth Bishop's One Art

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Many poems are impacted by the life of the poet. In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”, she uses her life experience to influence the meaning of her poem. She cunningly disguises her pain with the words of the poem. Based on her life struggles with loss, the poem “One Art” written by Elizabeth Bishop reveals that loss is something everyone encounters, but people can always convalesce from the pain of loss. Bishop experiences many hardships with the effects of loss throughout her life. As a young child, her mother was instituted after a nervous breakdown from the death of her father, and “1916 was… The last time her daughter saw her [mother]” (Unterecker). Following the loss, Bishop lived with many different family members before she could become independent and head to college. After she finished her studies, she traveled around the world. One of her destinations was South America where she “fell in love with Lota Soares” who later committed suicide, which Bishop had a hard time recovering from this loss (Miller). She returned to America after Soares’ death and met Alice Methfessel when she taught at Harvard University. The poem “One Art” arose from her fear of losing Alice Methfessel, the person that saved her from the grief of Lota Soares’ death (Miller). She developed “One Art” with sixteen drafts of the poem. Bishop’s poems are tranquil observations …show more content…
She is telling the readers that the losses throughout her life do affect her, no matter how small, but the losses should not take over their lives, instead, they should become resilient to the pain, much like Bishop had in her lifetime. She uses “One Art” to reveal her experience with loss as well as influence others that hide from their pain to embrace the pain of loss through the use of art and become
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