Biography And Personal Response: One Art By Elizabeth Bishop

Biography and Personal response Elizabeth Bishop faced a difficult childhood she lost her father when she was one year old and four years later her mother was put into an institution because she was suffering from mental instability. This resulted in her living with her grandparents in both Nova Scotia, Canada, and Massachusetts.Under their guardianship, Bishop was sent to the elite Walnut Hills School for Girls and to Vassar College(Joseph Breitenbach, Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry Foundation). Through attending Vassar college she founded the influential literary journal, Con Spirito with a group of students that included Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Margaret Miller. Through college, she also meets her lifelong friend and mentors Marianne …show more content…
All losses, she insists, are equal and bearable; the feelings of abandonment bound up in grief should roll off a person’s back as easily as a misplaced pen. The idea is clearly false, but there’s a deep human desire that it should be true( Joseph Frankel, Coming to Terms With Loss in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’, The Atlantic). As a person who has faced losses in my life, it was interesting to see the way another person saw misfortune, particularly since all the misfortunes were personal. Although I couldn't relate to the loss of a continent or the watch, I could relate to the loss of the house and a loved one. When I was in middle school there was a house fire that happened in the middle of the night while we were all asleep, luckily no one was hurt because my sister woke up and got us all out of the house in time. Although we all got out of the house safely I always found it difficult knowing the house I had lived in my whole life was gone along with all our belongings, it was not something I had moved on from easily. When I read this poem I thought that it was irritating that Bishop keeps insisting that you could move on easily from such losses. However my perspective changed when I read the last stanza, in this stanza the speaker is more reluctant to proceed from the departure of a loved one, it's the first time as a reader that I realized the author was using this poem as a reminder. This poem was for the speaker to be able to complete her grieving and proceed to live her life. It appeared that the speaker was reminding herself, she has experienced a greater deal of loss already so one more misfortune is nothing. The last stanza in this poem makes me feel as though the speaker wasn't attempting to demonstrate the best way to move on from a loss, but to remind herself that it is time to move on and that she will