Still, we must learn to lose, we are reminded by Elizabeth Bishop, and will not be a disaster. Of course not, but sometimes feel like one.
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911. His father died before she turned one year old and her mother was taken to a hospital when she was 5. Bishop never see again. She was raised by his grandparents. He lived about 17 years in Brazil, after finishing his college education. He received numerous awards, and in 1956 received the Pulitzer. His poetry exhibits a tendency to combine the factual and the imaginary, creating visual effects, both realistic and surreal. His poems are rooted in precise and unambiguous acts of observation, with purity and precision in his language, which in turn are unpredictable. Compared with the poet Marianne Moore.
So Many Things seem filled with the intent to Be Lost That
Their loss is no disaster.
day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (The joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't Have Lied. It's Evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
May Though it look like (Write it!) Like disaster.
From: The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.