One Art

Elizabeth Bishop favored privacy in her personal and professional life. She practiced restraint in her poems, favoring an objective tone over writing about emotionally wrought personal issues. Though “One Art” includes personal loss, Bishop carefully dilutes and even plays with emotion by using humor and a closed poetic form: the villanelle. She also favored meticulous revision, cutting anything deemed unnecessary from final drafts—a process that can take months.

Despite her distaste for “confessing” in poems, Bishop befriended Robert Lowell—one of the most popular and controversial Confessional poets.

Confessional poetry focuses on personal exploration and doesn’t shy away from making public that which is painful. Lowell, for instance, infamously used (and changed) his ex-wife’s private letters in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dolphin—an act that upset Bishop and many others in the literary world. Sylvia Plath, perhaps the most popular Confessional poet, wrote about her marriage dissolving, death, and suicide. Though sensational, Confessional poetry placed American poetics in a new frontier, providing a fresh, raw outlook on open form writing and previously taboo subjects.

Bishop preferred her private life to stay separate from her poetry as much as possible; this included her same-sex attraction and feminist beliefs. Other female poets of her time sometimes thought Bishop unreceptive to feminism because Bishop actively refrained from publishing in all-female publications. Bishop, however, wanted others to judge her work based on its own merit and not on her gender or the sex norms of the day. “One Art” underscores just how Bishop approached her personal and professional life: Like the tightly wound villanelle, she focused on craft and overcoming loss as exercises in living. “One Art” shows that poetry can be emotive, impactful, critically praised, and personal without succumbing to what Bishop considered public displays of affection and affectation.