Quote by Elizabeth Bishop: “The art of losing isn't hard to master.”

Loss is something we practice constantly — keys, time, people. Bishop opens her poem with almost breezy confidence before gradually revealing the devastating loss underneath. The irony is that mastering the art of losing doesn't make the deepest losses hurt less; it just means we've learned to survive them.

One Art was published in Geography III in 1976, late in Bishop's life, after decades of personal loss including the death of her partner Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967. The poem's controlled, almost wry surface barely contains the grief beneath it.

American poet known for her precise, restrained verse and her long residency in Brazil. Her collection Geography III, which contains One Art, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976; she was the first American to win the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.