Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art,"… [a masterly villanelle], is a convincingly drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what drabness may do for an all-too-golden repetitive form. It is superior to the maudlin manias of Thomas, finer than the cerebrations of Empson and still severe, and takes its place along with those of Auden, James Schuyler, and a few other premonitory practitioners' specimen stanzas.

The title is "One Art," and it identifies for us the integrity and lack of integrity that remain the polarizing tensions of the poem. It is indeed a poem of explicit art, of many-minded cunningness. The poem reminds us, as Freud does in his chapters upon the theme of forgetting in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, that the most buried life corresponds in its dynamic aspects to writing, to expression. The poem is necessarily self-referential and self-reflexive whilst it never gives up its...