Life & Background
Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911; her father died when she was eight months old and her mother was institutionalised when she was five, after which she never saw her again. She was raised by grandparents in Nova Scotia and then relatives in Massachusetts. At Vassar she met Marianne Moore, who became a mentor. An inheritance allowed her to travel, and she lived in Key West, then for fifteen years in Brazil with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares, a relationship that ended in Soares's death. She published very slowly — four slim collections in a lifetime — and revised for years, keeping one poem in progress for two decades. She taught at Harvard in her last years and died in Boston in 1979.
One Art
A villanelle. It opens with the assertion that the art of losing isn't hard to master, since so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. The poem then works up a deliberate scale: lost door keys, an hour badly spent; then places, names, and where it was you meant to travel; then her mother's watch, and three loved houses; then two cities, some realms she owned, two rivers, a continent. Each is dismissed with the refrain. The final stanza turns to losing a person — the joking voice, a gesture — and the refrain finally breaks under the strain, with the speaker instructing herself in parentheses to write it, and admitting the loss may look like disaster.
The villanelle's obsessive repetition is the point: the form insists on the same claim while the content escalates until the claim collapses, and the parenthetical command to write it is the moment the composure the poem has been performing gives way. Bishop's method throughout is patient, exact observation — the fish's brown skin hung in strips, the filling station's doily — held so long that emotional meaning arrives without being announced. She disliked confessional poetry and refused to be published in women-only anthologies, and her reticence about her own life is a critical topic in itself, particularly given how much of it the poems handle obliquely.
Why Bishop Matters
Bishop's reputation has risen steadily since her death, and she is now normally placed among the two or three most important American poets of the mid-century. She offers the standard contrast to the confessional mode of her friend Robert Lowell — the same material handled through restraint and description rather than disclosure — which makes the pairing a common examination question. One Art is among the finest villanelles in English.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- North & South1946
- Poems: North & South — A Cold Spring1955
- Questions of Travel1965
- The Complete Poems1969
- Geography III1976