The speaker of “One Art” doesn’t reveal anything about their age, gender, racial identity, or class background. All we know is that the speaker has experienced loss in their life. For the most part, it seems like they’ve faced the loss of cherished places, such as “my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses” (lines 10–11). However, as becomes clear in the poem’s final stanza, the speaker is currently facing the loss of someone particularly beloved to them, whom they address as “you” (line 16). The speaker’s struggle with this loss motivates them to insist repeatedly, and in bad faith, that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” (lines 1, 6, 12, and, in slightly different form, 18). If loss and the grief that comes with it were easy to process, then the speaker wouldn’t have to keep telling themself that “loss is no disaster” (line 3). Nor would they need to minimize the pain they’re feeling by implicitly comparing the loss of a beloved person to “the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent” (lines 4–5). The speaker’s clearly in denial, even as they are trying to process their grief.

Although the speaker remains anonymous, the critical tradition surrounding “One Art” has often understood the speaker as a stand-in for Bishop herself. Only one piece of evidence within the poem clearly points to this possibility. In the final lines (lines 17–19), the speaker includes a parenthetical command that seems to indicate the speaker writing rather than speaking:

                It’s evident
     the art of losing’s not too hard to master
     though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

If the speaker is, in fact, the person writing the very poem we’re reading, it’s logical to associate the speaker with the poem’s author: Bishop. Aside from this detail, critics have linked the losses described in the poem to specific losses Bishop herself experienced during her life. For one thing, she composed the poem around the time when she and her partner, Alice Methfessel, were separated. Bishop also lost both her parents when she was still young, and the various disturbances surrounding their deaths meant that she had to move frequently, losing one home after another. As an adult, Bishop lived in Brazil with her first partner, an architect named Lota de Macedo Soares. However, Soares’s death by suicide brought an abrupt and violent end to their life together, sending Bishop back to the United States and thereby causing her to lose a whole “continent.”

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