separate by its very form. In this closing quatrain, the speaker describes what she considers to be the greatest loss of all—that of a person, "you," an unnamed lover. The effect of the poem's gradually intensifying losses is to make clear that the speaker believes the loss of this person to be greater than that of cities, rivers, and continents, something which clearly emphasizes the person's importance in the speaker's life. The tense in this final quatrain is notable, however. The beloved person has not yet, perhaps, been lost—the speaker declares that even in losing her, "I shan't have lied." However, the speaker's use of the imperative "shan't," rather than the more conditional "won't," does not allow much room for hope. The speaker is sure that, like the keys, and the watch, and the continents, the beloved will be lost. In the final line of the poem, though, the speaker betrays herself in the parenthetical phrase "(Write it!)." This command, apparently self-directed, indicates that the speaker's insistence that losing things is not a "disaster," and that it is easy to learn how to lose things successfully, is a false claim, mere bravado. The speaker, it seems, is repeating her refrain not in order to share her experience of losing well with an audience, but simply to console herself. She has lost so much; she is sure that she will lose more. The only way she can cope with this fact is to tell herself—using the rigid, stylized form of the villanelle—that none of these great losses are too difficult to be borne.

One Art: Letters, the selected letters of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is a major literary event. Bishop’s pared-down sense of craft allowed few of the facts of her personal life to surface in her work. With her astounding ear and refined eye, details in her poetry speak volumes without necessarily revealing the events or even the major characters that inspired her writing. Bishop’s singular sensibility lures readers to want to know more about her. Now, with Robert Giroux’s generous selection of more than five hundred letters, a full portrait of the poet emerges.

In the litigious society of late twentieth century America, letters and diaries of deceased well-known figures have taken on an increased significance, since they can offer unsubstantiated facts, impressions, and gossip and still be published without fear of legal challenges. Although lawyers cannot be expected to understand, even erroneous gossip holds its bit of truth. Yet One Art is not only a wellspring of literary gossip. The book is a key to the facts and observations that inspired Bishop’s great poetry. In particular, it relates for the first time a genuine sense of the complicated relationship between Bishop and the Brazilian city planner Lota de Macedo Soares, a bond that lasted fifteen years and that ended in Lota’s suicide.

Biographies and studies have analyzed in detail Bishop’s troubled childhood in Nova Scotia, with her father’s early death and her mother’s mental breakdown. Brett Millier’s 1993 biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, provides a good interpretation of Bishop’s use of her early personal history in her writings. Bishop escapes Millier, however, when she moves to Brazil. Lota remains a shadowy figure whose suicide haunts the rest of the biography, leaving the reader mystified by the principal figure in Bishop’s adult life. After reading the letters, anyone who relishes Bishop’s poetry will also sense that Millier gives too much weight to the two women who had relationships with Bishop after Lota’s death. Lota’s death movingly haunts the letters of Bishop’s final years; in writing to friends, she leaves no doubt that Lota was the major emotional, sexual, and intellectual relationship of her life.

One Art is happily the antidote to Millier’s disappointing work, sketching—in Bishop’s own words—the development of her complex love both for Brazil and for Lota, who quickly emerges as a fascinating, complex character. Since the letters begin with a collegiate Bishop, the volume provides a portrait of the adult poet, one without Freudian or deterministic overview. Bishop speaks for herself and manages to transcend her biographers and critics.

Bishop’s first letters are coquettish, cherry missives to girlfriends from Vassar College, from which she was graduated in 1934. Bishop’s classmates were a stellar crop, including Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, Louise Crane, and Muriel Rukeyser. A flurry of letters surrounds Con Spirito, the renegade literary journal Bishop began in association with her friends as an alternative to the campus magazine. Already regarded as a literary force, Bishop was soon introduced by the school librarian to poet Marianne Moore, who immediately recognized the young poet’s potential. Bishop courted Moore in a series of wonderful letters, inviting her on outings to the circus, where they fed the elephants graham crackers, and to view a film documentary on Mongolia.

After college, Bishop began the first of her travels to the south, reporting back to Moore on the storks and camels of Morocco and the snakes and alligator wrestlers of Florida. Bishop learned from Moore the virtue and power of description; for both poets, to create a precise verbal rendering of an object or animal was both a kind of evaluation and analysis and the essence of poetry. Bishop settled in Key West for nine years, buying a house with her friend Louise Crane. While there, she began getting poems and an occasional story published, working slowly toward the publication of her first book, North and South, in 1946.

Only after four years of correspondence did Bishop address Moore as “Marianne”—an event that she celebrated by writing the name large, as if it were lit with electric lights. Bishop received explicit critiques of her poems from Moore, until with “Roosters” she had the courage to reject Moore’s suggested rewrite. Much more valuable as an informal portrait of the poet, the letters only hint at Bishop’s evolution as a poet. Nevertheless, for the Bishop enthusiast there are astounding revelations relating to specific poems, especially in regard to their incredibly slow evolution. The most amazing example is in a 1946 letter to Moore detailing a bus trip from Nova Scotia to Key West. At the end of the letter, Bishop describes the appearance of a moose on the road in the middle of night. This incident inspired the classic poem “The Moose,” begun in 1956 and not completed until 1972, twenty-six years after the incident.

Robert Lowell was introduced to Bishop by Randall Jarrell, and their correspondence began after his review of North and South. With Lowell, Bishop enjoyed talking shop, and the two poets were to prove major influences on each other. Their friendship develops through the letters, culminating in Lowell’s manic reassessment in 1957 (included in One Art) that his never-uttered marriage proposal to Bishop nine years earlier had continued to be for him a temptation of “the other life that might have been.” Bishop blithely ignores Lowell’s skewed sense of the past “moment,” focusing instead on personal chitchat and poet talk. From other letters her friendship and concern for Lowell are clear, as well as her understanding of his unstable psychological profile, but never did she take seriously his odd romantic overtures.

Bishop’s drinking problem surfaced in Key West, culminating with her extreme anxieties about assuming a job in 1949 as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. The experience with Washington bureaucracy was a disaster for Bishop, prompting a series of desperate letters to friends such as the painter Loren MacIver and her loyal doctor, Anny Baumann. Bishop’s bouts of depression and illness are recurring topics throughout the letters, prompting cyclical returns to health and new promises for increased poetic productivity. She was continually anxious about her inability to work quickly or steadily and seems to have turned to letter writing as a release from the pressures of poetry, as well as a pathway into her serious work.

One senses that a real desperation prompted Bishop’s 1951 trip to South America, which happily resulted in her prolonged visit at the Brazilian home of Lota de Macedo Soares while recovering from a fateful allergy to cashew nuts. The letters from 1951 are a bit sketchy, but soon the facts become apparent. Lota invited Bishop to live with her in her newly constructed, modern architectural house above a mountain suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Bishop’s letters from Brazil are the highlight of One Art, excitedly chronicling the exotic flora and fauna as well as the comedy of setting up a household in a less than efficient country.

Lota soon built Bishop an astoundingly beautiful writing studio perched on the rocky cliffs above the new house. Their “utter happiness” together consisted of voracious reading—spiced by subscriptions to the best journals and magazines from New York and London—along with a continual stream of visitors to break up the solitude. Lota was intimately connected to the elite of Brazil, and Bishop became friends with the country’s literati, eventually translating from the Portuguese a selection of her favorite poets.

Although somewhat reticent in regard to Bishop’s relationship with Lota, the letters describe a domestic bliss that Bishop was never to experience again. A rare portrait of a homosexual coupling emerges, one energized by the gaiety and sophistication of an artistic, international set. A long stretch of letters—including a new correspondence with poet James Merrill—relates Bishop’s giddy love for her new life, as she conveys dishy gossip and describes taking visiting celebrity Alexander Calder to the carnival (he watches the sambas for six hours). Choice literary opinions crop up: Bishop likes the poetry of Christian Morgenstern as well as that of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler; she detests the self-indulgence of J. D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Mary McCarthy’s publication of The Group (1963) sets off a small flurry of gossipy speculations about the fictional identities of fellow Vassar classmates, as well as Bishop’s between-the-lines assessment that McCarthy’s novel is a rather cheap sellout to popular tastes.

In Brazil, Bishop produced some of her best poems, as well as the stories about her childhood in Nova Scotia that are some of her most accomplished works. Her positive experience translating the charming 1890’s The Diary of “Helena Morley” (1957) was offset by her other prose work from this period, an ill-fated picture book for Time/Life about Brazil that became a nightmare of compromise and bad editing. Bishop’s venom towards her Time/Life editors was unrestrained, and the book weighed heavily on her last years with Lota.

Problems in their relationship began when, through political connections, Lota was put in charge of the development of a park and children’s playground in Rio de Janeiro and the couple was forced to spend time away from their idyllic mountain retreat. Bishop writes to friends of Lota’s exhaustion and political frustrations, which were clearly taking their toll on the relationship. Bishop’s drinking problems are also alluded to, chiefly in letters to her doctor.

Bishop impulsively bought a house outside Rio in the mountain town Ouro Preto, but even this renovation project failed to lure Lota away from the sticky politics surrounding her park. Bishop escaped the worsening situation by agreeing to accept a teaching position at the University of Washington in Seattle. In the letters she asserts that she definitely means to return to Lota and Brazil, but she was clearly confused about the problems in her relationship and adamant about her need to get away from a painful situation.

Bishop was fifty-five when she first began teaching. The sudden exposure to lazy and vague student writings was a bit of a shock. The experience seems to have solidified her faith in craft, as well as her own self-confidence. Bishop returned to Brazil in the summer of 1966 after only one term, hoping to patch things up with Lota. A series of letters to Baumann, however, reveals the hopelessness of the situation. Lota’s own ill health and anxieties about Bishop’s drinking problems escalated to the breaking point. When the couple made the attempt to travel together in Europe, Lota suffered a breakdown and was forced to return to Brazil. Although Bishop’s letters to Lota were for the most part destroyed, one of the few remaining is a chatty note to her in the hospital that hints at the lasting nature of their intimacy.

The letters only hint at the anxiousness of the next few months. Bishop returned to New York alone, supposedly on the advice of Lota’s doctor. Lota followed and upon arrival consumed a fatal overdose in Bishop’s apartment. A shell-shocked Bishop reports the death to friends in letters that movingly convey her confused, guilt-ridden love and remorse. Before returning to Brazil, she was in a miserable state, breaking her arm and left shoulder in a drunken fall. In Brazil, she stayed in Ouro Preto for only a few weeks before flying to San Francisco, where she met a young girlfriend from Seattle, known in the letters only as “XY.”

Reentering America in 1968 after fifteen years in Brazil, Bishop underwent culture shock, describing in letters to her friends her bemused reaction to the “new world” of supermarkets and laundromats. XY and her young child were at first a comforting distraction to Bishop. Homesick for Brazil, she even went so far as to get a mynah bird, proposing to teach it to say, “I too dislike it,” as well as her favorite line of her own poetry, “Awful but cheerful.” Under XY’s tutelage, she tried to comprehend the turbulent San Francisco “scene”; she even interviewed the wife of Eldridge Cleaver for a potential magazine story. Yet San Francisco never truly clicked for Bishop, and her letters return again and again to the subject of Lota.

Bishop returned to Ouro Preto with XY to renovate her house, now rechristened for her mentor as Casa Mariana. After about ten months, however, XY had a “breakdown,” and Bishop managed to send her back to the United States. The importance of this relationship to Bishop is not clear in the letters, since she never adequately describes its nature, continually returning in her correspondence with old friends to the issues surrounding Lota’s death. Bishop rather coolly reports to Baumann the sad circumstances surrounding XY’s departure. Soon she accepted a teaching job at Harvard University, wanting to put both Brazil and XY behind her.

In Cambridge, Bishop fell into a relationship with the much younger Alice Methfessel, a relationship that proved to be a relief from the tensions of the past. Alice acted as secretary, coping with the increased responsibilities of Bishop’s reputation as one of America’s most respected poets. Constantly worried about her finances, Bishop began reading all over the country, as well as continuing to teach. Her relationship with Lowell came to its climax with her moving letter criticizing his The Dolphin (1973) for its mix of fact and fiction regarding his breakup with Elizabeth Hardwick. Quoting Thomas Hardy, Bishop exhorts Lowell to rewrite passages that tread on personally charged subject matter.

In her own work, Bishop managed to address her personal tragedy indirectly in the amazing poem “One Art,” which gives this volume its title. The letters fill in the texture and details outlined in that poem, tracing how Bishop attempted to master “the art of losing” through her appreciation of the particulars that make life worth living. The day Bishop died in 1979 of a cerebral aneurysm, she wrote a letter chastising the editor of an anthology for wanting to add footnotes to her poems in order to make things easier on student readers. For Bishop, the poems spoke for themselves without interpretation. Enhancing their continuing revelation, One Art chronicles the complicated life behind the poetry’s slow fruition. Bishop’s achievement is the richer for these observations.

Sources for Further Study

ArtForum. XXXI, Summer, 1994, p. 525.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 10, 1994, p. 3.

The New Republic. CCXI, August 8, 1994, p. 29.

The New York Review of Books. XLI, June 9, 1994, p. 39.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, April 17, 1994, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLI, February 28, 1994, p. 68.

Time. CXLIII, April 25, 1994, p. 82.

The Times Literary Supplement. April 29, 1994, p. 3.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, May 1, 1994, p. 5.

The Women’s Review of Books. XI, July, 1994, p. 27.

ONE ART, the selected letters of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is a major literary event. Bishop’s pared-down sense of craft allowed few of the facts of her personal life to surface in her work. With her astounding ear and refined eye, details in her poetry speak volumes without necessarily revealing the events or even the major characters that inspired her writing. Bishop’s particularized sensibility lures readers to want to know more about her. Now, with Robert Giroux’s generous selection of more than five hundred letters, a full portrait of the poet emerges.

Bishop enjoyed the respect of the best writers of her time, most of whom became her intimate friends. The letters track Marianne Moore’s involvement in Bishop’s early poetry up until their well-known disagreement over the structure and colloquialism of the poem “Roosters.” Although the two remained close friends for life, Bishop’s rejection of Moore’s suggestions was a critical moment marking the maturity of the younger poet. Robert Lowell and Bishop shared an intense creative interchange despite Lowell’s intermittently manic bouts of skewed intimacy.

Bishop’s relationship with a Brazilian woman—city planner Lota de Macedo Soares—was the central event of her life, lasting fifteen years. Their partnership ended with Lota’s suicide, and event from which Bishop herself never recovered. Bishop’s years in Brazil provided a fantastic, other-worldly experience for the Nova Scotian-born poet, offering exotic flora and fauna that could be described in awed detail in letters to a perfect audience: Marianne Moore. Brazil also offered Bishop a place to hide from the oppressive literary responsibilities which had begun to overwhelm her in the United States, as well as a safely obscure location in which to have her first full-fledged lesbian relationship.

After Lota’s death and Bishop’s return to America, the letters track Bishop’s reluctant assumption of the responsibilities of literary celebrity as well as her struggles to remain cheerful despite battles with ill health. Casual, intimate and sprawling, ONE ART chronicles the everyday observations which inspired Bishop’s tightly knit poetic precision and fully humanizes the work of this master poet.

Sources for Further Study

ArtForum. XXXI, Summer, 1994, p. 525.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 10, 1994, p. 3.

The New Republic. CCXI, August 8, 1994, p. 29.

The New York Review of Books. XLI, June 9, 1994, p. 39.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIX, April 17, 1994, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLI, February 28, 1994, p. 68.

Time. CXLIII, April 25, 1994, p. 82.

The Times Literary Supplement. April 29, 1994, p. 3.

The Washington Post Book World. XXIV, May 1, 1994, p. 5.

The Women’s Review of Books. XI, July, 1994, p. 27.