Loss In One Art

There are many types of art. Music, painting, photography, and dancing are examples, but they just scratch the surface. An art is “a skill acquired by experience, study, or observation” (Art). This means that anything can be an art, and the author displays this concept throughout her poem. Some could say that because Elizabeth Bishop titled her poem “One Art,” she is referring to a single type of art, but the reader can find three varieties interwoven in the poem. The poem displays the arts of losing, coping with loss, and expressing that loss through writing. The first line of the poem states, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (1). This clearly distinguishes the first art as losing. The poem states, “Then practice losing farther, losing
Diehl writes that the title “conveys the implicit suggestion that mastery sought over loss in love is closely related to poetic control” (498). Bishop expresses her loss quite nonchalantly throughout the poem until the end. She seems to be indifferent to losing and comes across as unaffected by the subject. However, in the last stanza she breaks the façade and lets some of the despair show through her writing. She writes, “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not hard to master / through it may look like (Write it!) like disaster” (17-190. She expresses great difficulty conveying the message, particularly in the last line. McCabe writes, “The imperative self-prompt ‘(Write it!)’ conveys the immense energy needed to utter the last word of ‘disaster’” (503). She strains to finish the poem. This contradicts all that she written about the ease of loss. This tells the reader that she is not indifferent to loss; she feels it just as much as anyone. All of the loss essentially did have an effect on the author, and that losing in this instance was actually a