One Art: Letters [Paperback]

Elizabeth Bishop (Author), Robert Giroux (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 1995

From several thousand letters, written over fifty years - from 1928, when she was seventeen, to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979 - Robert Giroux has selected over five hundred and has written a detailed and informative introduction. One Art takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, displaying to the full the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great poet.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One Art is the best biography we have of the elusive Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Giroux, her editor and friend, has chosen well--and discreetly--from among the poet's several thousand letters. The collection begins with correspondence she wrote while still at Vassar in the '30s and ends with a letter written on the day she died, October 6, 1979. ("Well, I could go on--but I won't!" Bishop writes.) Still, we now have more than 600 pages of witty, well-mannered missives that often shade into deep emotion. Seemingly casual observation is a staple of Bishop's art and a delight in the letters: writing to Marianne Moore in 1938, she asserts that an unappealing stray she is nonetheless feeding looks just like Picasso's Absinthe Drinker. Nor is she any less irreverent when it comes to the lifestyles of the poetic and famous. In 1950, she tells Robert Lowell that she's reading Yeats's A Vision--"or trying to. Have you? Sometimes it's Jungian. The picture of Yeats going 'Woof! Woof!' in a lower berth, in the dark, in California, in order to wake up his wife, who was dreaming she was a cat, is very pleasing, I think."

Bishop often hid her sadness behind charm, but she could also be astonishingly frank. In addition to the personal revelations, there are discussions of poems' origins. "Quite a few lines of 'At the Fishhouses' came to me in a dream," she tells U. T. and Joseph Summers. "And the scene--which was real enough, I'd recently been there--but the old man and the conversation, etc., were all in a later dream." One caveat: Robert Giroux has kept commentary and notes to a minimum, so it's worth reading his introduction for deep background before you begin. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

This selection of poet Elizabeth Bishop's (1911-1979) letters is, as Giroux observes, a virtual autobiography. And though large, the book contains only a fraction of her correspondence. Among the most interesting letters are those to literary friends, including Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Marianne Moore; among the most disturbing are the anguished letters concerning personal tragedies, letters she asked the recipients to destroy but which the editor has printed because they "have remained extant." The letters show a continuity with the character presented in Bishop's poems: apparently, she really was a brilliant, modest and kind person. They also show the poet's eye and ear for detail ("Someone asked my landlord . . . if he didn't have an 'author' living in his house, and he replied, 'No, not an author, a writer' "). There is also a disarming, even dogged sense of humor, striking given the fact that much in the letters is dark: the poet's struggles against alcoholism, loneliness and a 15-year relationship that ended in the suicide of her lover, Lota Soares. Bishop's correspondence may have been a bulwark against emptiness; the letters engage the reader not with startling revelations, but with everyday acts of courage. Thus Bishop pleads with Lowell in 1960, "Please never stop writing me letters--they always manage to make me feel like my higher self."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 668 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374524459
• ISBN-13: 978-0374524456
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #918,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This collection changed my life, February 7, 2005

By 

Emily Logan "Elizabeth Bishop fan" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop (Hardcover)

I was a junior in college when I first read this book and subsequently viewed some of Elizabeth Bishop's handwritten poems/manuscripts/letters, etc. at the New York Public Library's Hand of the Poet exhibit. I was in love, enthralled, forever changed by this amazing woman's poems and her voice. These letters are an intimate look into the life of one of the most talented and elusive poets of the 20th Century. What a life of heartbreak and obstacle and yet she remained keenly interested in the human challenge--and amazingly connected to those she knew. In this age where the art of communication has been nearly wholly lost, to read this collection of letters is like stepping back in time. Bishop reminds us that the most important connections are those we make with others--and that taking the time to put pen to paper and to fully observe our world is the most priceless gift. I cannot recommend this collection highly enough. Buy one for yourself and one for any young person you know. Inspire yourself to write letters and learn from a true master. Bishop's voice and the intricacies of her personality shine through in this collection. A rare find from a rare and truly incredible poet.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Fell In Love With Elizabeth Bishop All Over Again!, April 21, 2002

By 

Lee Ann Roripaugh (Vermillion, South Dakota USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Art: Letters (Paperback)

In this amazing collection of Elizabeth Bishop's selected letters, all of the various nuances of her most personal voice --warm, intimate, keenly observant, whimsical and humorous, generous, shy, gutwrenchingly honest, decorous and demure -- come through with astonishing human clarity. Bishop's engaging and elegant epistolary style makes reading One Art almost like reading an epistolary novel. The collection certainly functions as a fascinatingly candid biography of the somewhat shy and elusive Bishop, and also provides marvelous glimpses of both her writing processes, and the contextual background against which many of her poems emerged. Mostly, though, I found myself liking Elizabeth Bishop to excess . . . her humor, her eye for detail, her weirdly shy and modest charisma, even her flaws . . . and wishing that I could have been one of her inner circle of friends receiving these wonderful letters.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revelations of the Artist, June 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop (Hardcover)

These letters provide a fascinating insight into the poet, who was as compelling in prose as in poetry. I love Bishop's work, and I am enjoying this book!