The Confession of Self-Deception in Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art'

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Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), course: Department of English and Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Everybody knows the feeling of losing little things. For most of us, the list of these things is very long. We lose pens and pencil cases at school, scarfs and gloves on trains or keys and wallets in restaurants. Elizabeth Bishops poem One Art, which was published in her 1976 volume Geography III, can be read as an instruction on how to deal with our losses. In her essay Bishops Sexual Poetics, Joanne Feit Diehl argues that the poem presents a series of losses as if to reassure both its author and its reader that control is possible (24). Its aim, as is the case with all of Bishops work, is not to be assigned into any particular classification (Vendler 294). Rather the poem reads like a lecture by an expert who teaches us the art of losing. In this term paper,I will show that Bishops One Art initially succeeds in building up an indifferent façade. However, in the course of the poem, the lyrical I realises that she cannot apply her approach to the loss of a person. While One Art serves as a recipe on how to deal with small everyday losses, it fails to provide strategies for coping with significant losses in life we all have to face.

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