One Art
BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
There's nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really.
> Elizabeth Bishop now stands as a major mid-twentieth-century American poet, whose influence has been felt among several subsequent generations of poets. . . . Her place in the canon of American poetry is secure.
> Bishop's first book of poems, "North & South," appeared in 1946; the second, "Poems" (including "North & South" and "A Cold Spring"), in 1955; the third, "Questions of Travel," in 1965, and the last, "Geography III," in 1976. Although her poems appeared periodically in The New Yorker, in her lifetime Bishop was overshadowed by more prolific and public contemporaries, even though they held her in high esteem, as, in Ashbery's words, "a writer's writer's writer."
> She was born on 8 February 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts, but her father died when she was eight months old. Her Nova Scotian mother fell into a mental illness from which she was unable to recover, suffering frightening breakdowns and hospitalizations. In 1916, after the last crisis, Bishop never saw her again.
> Bishop, though often ill, passed a relatively uneventful childhood and youth, attending public school, then boarding schools, and spending summers at Camp Chequesset on Cape Cod. She read voraciously, and began to write. Entering Vassar College in 1930, she first thought to study music, took Greek, and concentrated on literature. At times, she wished she were a painter, and, off and on throughout her life, made casual sketches and watercolor paintings.
> Most important to her transition into a postgraduate life in poetry, however, was her introduction, in her senior year, to modernist poet Marianne Moore, who became both friend for life and mentor and champion during her early career.
> In the winter of 1937, with her classmate Louise Crane she went on a fishing trip to Florida, and soon discovered Key West, where she would settle into the first of the "three loved houses," mentioned in her poem "One Art."
> A notation on her calendar for the year 1950 read: "Just about my worst so far." Relief came in the
form of a traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College. Departing in 1951, she resolved to travel around the world by freighter. Her first stop was Santos, Brazil.
> Leaving Santos, Bishop stopped in Rio de Janeiro to visit acquaintances she had met some years before, including the lively, cosmopolitan, well-connected Lota de Macedo Soares, who was at the time overseeing construction of a high-modernist home in the mountains near Petrópolis, north of Rio. . . . In Lota, she had found the most profound love of her life.
> Bishop loved country life, rural people and folk traditions, and was charmed by Lota's wit and eclectic knowledge of the arts and architecture. Together they settled into a decade of happiness at Samambaia -- Bishop's second "loved house" of "One Art" -- with visits to Lota's apartment overlooking Copacabana Beach in Rio.
> By the mid-sixties, both Elizabeth and Lota were strapped for cash. Elizabeth decided to accept a term of teaching offered by the University of Washington, over Lota's vociferous objection. She went, began an affair, which of course Lota discovered, and returned to more misery in Brazil. Lota's health had become perilous. . . . Doctors recommended that Elizabeth withdraw from the country, hoping that a separation might allow Lota to recover. Reluctantly, Elizabeth returned to New York, but against medical advice Lota determined to follow her. The two spent one evening together that Elizabeth believed was peaceful, but she woke in early morning to find Lota collapsing from an overdose. Lota lingered for a week in St. Vincent's Hospital, then died.
> For a time, Bishop thought that her creative life was over, but happily she was mistaken. Brazil remained with her as she recovered her voice to write some of the finest poems of her career, of both north and south, culminating in "Geography III."
> After a brief time in San Francisco, Bishop moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, invited by Robert Lowell to teach his courses at Harvard while he was on leave. . . . In Cambridge, too, Bishop met the last love of her life, Alice Methfessel, who became the dedicatee of "Geography III" and the immediate subject of Bishop's masterful villanelle of loving and loss, "One Art."
NOTES
"One Art" appears courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC, copyright © 1976. The opening quote is from a 1981 interview by Elizabeth Spires for The Paris Review. All the excerpts are from a longer biography written by Barbara Page (Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English, Vassar College), a well-known authority on Bishop. I'm deeply grateful to Prof. Page for her generous permission for reuse, with minor changes, of material from the "Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College" website.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the 50th installment of my column. Diane Ewart Grabowski deserves much credit for taking a great deal of trouble to correct my drafts. I am greatly indebted to Hande Seçkin Onat for her unfailing support and understanding. Donald Davidson once prefaced one of his books with a dedication to his mentor W. V. Quine. His inscription read simply "WITHOUT WHOM NOT." I would like to offer those three words now to her.
One Art
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.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! 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.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.