Essay about Elizabeth Bishop's One Art

After graduating from Vassar, Bishop lived in New York City, and spent time traveling the world. However, during this period Bishop struggled with physical and mental illness, as well as immense loneliness throughout her adult years. In 1938, Bishop moved from Manhattan to Key West, where many of her poems from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, North & South, were collected (Kalstone 18). “The Man-Moth,” “The Weed,” “Love Lies Sleeping,” “Roosters,” and “Paris, 7 A.M.” all emerge in this collection.

During the Romantic Movement in literature, numerous writers fed off one another’s ideas; thus, creating various patterns which reoccur throughout literary works. According to “The Literature Network,” John Keats is “usually regarded as the archetype of the Romantic writer.” Therefore, Keats himself is thought to be the original model for the writer during the Romantic Era. In his poem, “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” Keats uses various archetypes which provide added meaning and depth to this work of literature.

Emily Dickinson is an exceptional poet so much so that it is extremely difficult to place her in any single tradition she seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Her poetic form, with her customary four-line stanzas, ABCB rhyme schemes, and alternations in iambic meter between tetrameter and trimeter, is derived from Psalms and Protestant hymns, but Dickinson so thoroughly appropriates the forms interposing her own long, rhythmic dashes designed to interrupt the meter and indicate short pauses that the resemblance seems quite faint. Her subjects are often parts of the topography of her own psyche; she explores her own feelings with painstaking and often painful honesty but never loses sight of their universal poetic application;

In this poem, Williams uses a series of images to capture a fleeting moment in time, an emotion of admiration and desire. The poem consists of three stanzas of varying length, and each share in a similar method in portraying the woman and the narrator's relationship with her. Each stanza starts out with somewhat broad statements about the scene, and as they each progress, they become more specific until the image is pinned down to a specific moment in time. After reading the poem the reader is left with three separate images, which describe the emotion/admiration felt by the narrator for the woman.

Even though she continuously wrote poems until the end of her professional career, but at the same time, she was also an author of published short stories. One of her first and main published short stories was encompassed in the famous book, Questions of Travel. On the other hand, the poems of Bishop primarily focused her life. Her poems were also about her impersonations of the outside physical world. Most of her poetry collections are being taught in

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” is a lyrical poem, as opposed to one that is narrative and story-like, where the speaker is emotionally performing a kind of self-therapy in writing about her struggles in dealing with the many losses in her life, from the simplest of losses such as a set of keys, to the most painful loss, that of a loved one, most likely the person in her life to whom she was the closest. On a surface level reading, Ms. Bishop is suggesting that dealing with loss is an art form, and because there are so many opportunities in life where these situations present themselves, that with enough practice this “art” should be easy to master. But through the poem’s stanza development, it becomes painfully obvious that this poet is using irony and sarcasm to express what the speaker really feels, which is there is never enough time in life to master the art of losing. One never actually learns to master this art. Mishaps and catastrophes, which she terms disasters, just keep showing up.

In my answer I will be talking about my ideas on the themes, styles, and images in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop was born on the 8th of February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother, in shock, was sent to a mental hospital for five years. They were separated in 1916 until her mother finally died in 1934. She was raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia.

Before entering into the structural form of the poem, understanding the speaker’s motivations can assist in perceiving the reason for choosing the structure of a villanelle. The speaker appears to be a woman who, perhaps, recently lost a lover. The final stanza introduces an apostprophé, “you,” revealing the speaker’s motivation for writing. “Even losing you,” she says, provides evidence that “the art of losing’s not too hard to master” (16, 15.) The purpose of the poem builds up to the final stanza, with a litotes understating the severity of loss in an ironic sentiment, saying, “Even losing you…I shan’t have lived. It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master” (18.) The speaker narrows the focus of the poem till she directly addresses the addressee, employing humor the soften the hurt of such a loss that “may look like…disaster” (19.) The tone of the speaker significantly shifts in the sixth stanza, seen in the intimacy of the loss “losing you,” though there are two more minor shifts in the fourth

Poets’ representations of visual arts often feature themes of love and romance. Many poets have the root of romance in their nature; therefore, to praise and to admire the beauty of love and intimacy become important components in many poems. At the beginning of Keats’ poem, he shows his reader a vivid scene of love about “pursuit” and “escape” between men and women (9); in addition, a suggestion of intimacy about “marble men and maidens overwrought” is another example of how the speaker acknowledged the theme of love on the urn (42). Compare to Keats’ poem, Lee’s poem contains stronger erotic scene of intimacy between the speaker and his lover Donna in the yard. Interestingly, using the speech of his father, the speaker emphasizes the similes between holding a persimmon and caressing his lover: sniffing the “scent”, sensing the “texture”, and feeling the “weight” (86-88). Thus, the frequent association between images in visual arts and poets’ representation of love is another charming feature of literature.

Elizabeth Bishop’s use of language in her poems has allowed readers to grasp a better understanding of feeling in her poetry. Her concentration of minor details aided me in building mental images while reading her poems. By focusing deeply on the description of images, for me to understand the emotion and intensity of each line. Often times, Bishop would gain inspiration from the images she witnessed with her own eyes. Several of Bishop’s poems are in fact based entirely off personal experiences and past memories; Elizabeth Bishop guides the reader through descriptive detail, in order to aid them to fully understand the feeling in her poetry. In this, this essay I will examine Bishop’s use of language and how it aids the reader in uncovering

After quick scan of the poem "One Art", the reader should recognize the poem as having the closed form. The poem is regular, symmetrical, and falls into stanzas. The first five stanzas have three lines and the last stanza contains four lines. A longer peruse of "One Art" will help the reader identify the villanelle form. The first line of the poem is repeated in the 2nd, 4th and 6th stanzas, while the last word of the first stanza (3rd line) is repeated in the 3rd, 5th, and 6th stanzas. The poem appears to have the powerful music effect that is usually associated with a villanelle. The poem hints at being autobiographical after reading about Elizabeth Bishop's life in the "Lives of the Poets" section of the text- Literature an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. The personal voice also hints at the poem being autobiographical. Further analysis of the poem and Bishop's life leads to the discovery of confessional poetry.Researching The Microsoft Encarta 96 Encyclopedia tells us that Elizabeth Bishop's works will usually "highlight the sense of strangeness that can underlay ordinary events"("Elizabeth Bishop"). The text (Literature an Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama) makes reference to Bishop's use of metaphor. Elizabeth Bishop refers to losing as an art. The American Heritage Talking Dictionary defines art as a skill that is practiced ("art"). "One Art" makes specific reference to practicing losing (line 7). Loss is defined as a condition of being deprived

Auden loved to write about friendship in all its variations. His poems very often dealt with people who were still alive. —— “Auden… wrote poems in praise of friends who were alive and he rejoiced in their vitality”(Bold 9).Similarly to him Jennings also likes to write about people who are important to her .Another similarity is that, like Auden, Elizabeth Jennings looks for order in her poetry. Auden also sought for order in both his life and art.

From the perspective of a normal person with penetrating perception and description instead of omniscient point of view (or God), the poetry of Elisabeth Bishop tend to allow the truth drift itself with seemingly natural expression. There is realism, lyricism and romanticism in her work, all melded in a most individual manner of perception and poetry-making, and I would try to analyze the diversity of the vision angles of her work.

This paper examines, from the perspective of ‘stylistic analysis’, Emily Dickinson’s poem “If I can stop one heart from breaking’’. The investigation is made through the levels of Graphological, Syntactical, Phonological and Grammatical patterns. Literary devices that add much to the meaning of Dickinson poetry have also been picked up from this poem to reveal her thoughts, motifs, style and structure of her poetry in general. Mood and tone of the poetess, her approach in this poem and the setting of the poem has also

Many poems of this volume were not included in the Collected Poems. The reason could be that there was much controversy about whether these poems were confessional or not. Elizabeth Jennings does not think so and does not want to be thought of in relation to Anne Sexton’s poetry. (Interview).The most important reason she states is that most of the poems in the book are about other people and not about herself. This is true but she also writes about suicide, suffering and madness. At least some of the experiences she made during her mental breakdown seem to be reflected in a few poems of this volume. This collection of poems won the Richard Hillary Award in 1966.