Disaster in Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art Essay -- One Art

Disaster in Elizabeth Bishops angiotensin converting enzyme ArtArt is not life. More, it is a deception, mirroring experience and emotion, but never rightfully becoming that which it reflects. Art is attractive in that it is a controlled balance between rigid structure, which is too mundane for its purposes, and chaotic discord, which is too feral. Poetry is art. Loss is not. In her villanelle One Art, Elizabeth Bishop proves this to be so. The poem itself is an emotive crescendo, and while its speaker struggles to hold the pain of loss within the confines of art, its readers note the incongruity of such an effort. One word prompts them, and fuels Bishops crescendo with a momentum, a tone, and a coda disaster impels the poem One Art.Fittingly, the crescendo begins softly. The poems opening stanza assumes a fairly impassive tone, which transpires from the speakers feigned indifference toward the prospect of losing. Though the immediate clash between Bishops title and its implication concisely upsets the mind from a logical standpoint, the speakers hasty assurance that loss is no disaster seem...