The Americaness Of One Art By Elizabeth Bishop

The Americaness of One Art By Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop like many accomplished people began her journey of greatness with broken childhood; a childhood where she became familiar with death, relocation, and illness. She grew up as an only child born in Worcester, Massachusetts her father died when she was only eight months old leaving her mother to raise a child on her own. Unfortunately Bishop’s mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized, her mother remained in an asylum until death and never reunited with her daughter. This resulted in a series of relocations to with multiple relatives. Although Bishop may not have felt like she belonged throughout her life, her poem specifically One Art is universal. Her ideas and themes
She describes losing a pair of house keys “Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.” and although many of us would get flustered and it may start our day off wrong, we know there is much worse loss. She continues on to add that she has lost cities and people “I lost two cities, lovely ones…Even losing you I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master", although she does say that they may not have been negative losses these lines communicate typical human values. This poem displays that we value our loved ones the most versus a pair of house keys. It is a very American thing to value materialistic things and we take for granted the people around us. It isn’t until we lose these people that we realize that they had matter more to us than the materialistic things. This is an idea almost everyone can agree with; the idea that human loss is much more greater then materialistic loss. This poem has second degree Americaness because its values are American but Americans may not even know their values until they lose what they had valued. These values such as people and object aren’t specifically American either they are universal ideas similar to the One Arts