Poetry
22 “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (Villanelle)
Biography
Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father was a prosperous building contractor, but he died while Elizabeth was still an infant. He left enough of a legacy so his daughter, when she came of age, would be free to travel widely and pursue her work as a poet. Elizabeth’s mother, devastated by her husband’s death, broke down emotionally and had to be institutionalized.
Elizabeth was sent to live with her mother’s family in Nova Scotia. She was happy there, but her father’s family was wealthy enough to effect Elizabeth’s return to Massachusetts to live with them. She was less happy there, and she was sent off again, this time to live with her mother’s sister, who encouraged her love of reading, her interest in poetry, especially. Her health was never robust; she would suffer from asthma all her life. But she was always a good student, and in 1934, she graduated from Vassar.
She travelled widely—France, Spain, Africa, Italy—then settled for a time in Key West, where she transformed her travel memories into poetry: North & South was published in 1946. Her famous and much anthologized poem “The Fish” is included in this volume. She would return to Florida often throughout her life.
Bishop moved to New York, the best city for networking and for making the contacts a poet needed, where she would live until 1951. The poets Marianne Moore (1887–1972) and Robert Lowell (1917–1977) befriended her, offered her the emotional support she always needed, and helped her promote her work. Her next book, Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring, was published in 1955. It won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
By then, Bishop was living in Rio de Janeiro. She had left New York in the fall of 1951, planning a world tour. But in Rio, she caught up with Lota de Macedo Soares, whom she had met in New York. They fell in love and lived together until 1967. Lota had an apartment in Rio and an estate near Petropolis, an enclave for wealthy Brazilians. For a time, Elizabeth thrived. Her health improved, and she controlled the heavy drinking that had plagued her all her adult life. Brazil’s natural beauty inspired her. She was never a prolific poet, but her third book, Questions of Travel, was published in 1965.
Lota was a landscape architect from a prominent Brazilian family. In 1961, she was commissioned to oversee the development of the lush gardens and buildings for Rio’s Flamengo Park, a massive project which consumed much of her time. She also became increasingly involved in Brazil’s frenetic politics. The intensity of her work strained her relationship with Elizabeth.
In 1965, Bishop took a teaching position at the University of Washington in Seattle. She returned to Brazil in the summer of 1966, hoping to recover her happy life there. It was not to be. Lota could not cope with the stress of her work, and she was furious to learn of Elizabeth’s relationship in Seattle w