"One Art" is a poem by American poet Elizabeth Bishop, originally published in The New Yorker in 1976. Later that same year, Bishop included the poem in her book Geography III, which includes other works such as "In the Waiting Room" and "The Moose". It is considered to be one of the best villanelles in the English Language, and is compared to the works of W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and more. The poem shares the title of a collection of Bishop's letters from 1928 to 1979, published as her autobiography in 1994. These letters were exchanged with many influential people in her life, such as her mentor at Vassar, Marianne Moore, and her longtime friend and collaborator Robert Lowell. "One Art" is considered autobiographical by some. The poem was written in a period of separation from her partner, Alice Methfessel, and it was one of her final works; she died three years after it was published in 1979. Geography III and the poem within was met with positive critical reviews and awards; in 1976 and the years following, she received both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the "Books Abroad"/ Neusdadt International Prize for Literature and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Background "One Art" recounts all the significant losses that Bishop had faced in her life, dating back to the death of her father when she was eight months old and the subsequent loss of her grieving mother, who was confined permanently a mental asylum when Bishop was five years old. Her move from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Nova Scotia was the first of many, as her health and upbringing were debated by members across her family. She used an inheritance from her father to travel to Key West, Florida. In 1951, she traveled to Brazil on a traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College, where she met Lota de Macedo Soares and remained there with her for nearly seventeen years until Soares committed suicide in 1967. In 1970, she accepted Robert Lowell's invitation to take over his teaching position for a few semesters at Harvard University, before her upcoming retirement. Bishop lived on campus in the Kirkland House, where she met the house secretary Alice Methfessel, twenty-seven at the time. Methfessel helped her adjust to her new life, and the two grew close very quickly, developing an intimate relationship. Bishop's life,