Elizabeth Bishop (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master” is the refrain in Elizabeth Bishop’s masterful villanelle “One Art,” and the irony cuts several ways at once. She spent her life as a woman and as a poet modestly—and fiercely—perfecting that “art.” She never knew her father, a prominent builder who died at the age of thirty-nine, before her first birthday. Her grief-stricken mother had to be institutionalized in her native Nova Scotia in 1916, and Bishop never saw her again; she received news of her death as she graduated from Vassar in 1934. Raised by her Canadian...
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