The version of this poem used to create this study guide appears in: Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983).

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

The primary theme of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is the inevitability of loss throughout life. Some scholars believe that the exploration of this theme stems from Bishop’s own losses during her lifetime, beginning with the death of her father when she was a child, and her mother’s ensuing mental illness. While Bishop’s poetry is often very intimate and personal, her work defies being categorized as “confessional,” as is the work of many of her peers such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. This is due to the fact that throughout most of the poem, the speaker maintains a psychological and emotional distance from her musings through her frequent use of irony.

The poem begins with the assertion that, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (1). This seemingly simple claim, however, refers to the common experience of loss as a form of art, which immediately elevates it beyond the everyday. As the poem progresses, so does the magnitude of those things being lost, as well as the speaker’s assertions that still losing them isn’t “a disaster” (3). In the final quatrain of the poem, however, the speaker’s attitude towards loss seems to change, providing the opportunity for readers to notice cracks in the speaker's confident tone.