One Art by Elizabeth Bishop - a Lesson in Using Emotional Intelligence Skills to Turn Memory to One’s Own Benefit
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop - a Lesson in Using Emotional Intelligence Skills to Turn Memory to One’s Own Benefit

Summary/Abstract: Poems as carriers of countless emotions by means of a significant scarcity of words are probably the best means of stimulating the readers’ world of feelings and train-of-thinking. In order to demonstrate the way in which poems conceal a world of emotional intelligent manifestations and become therefore adept facilitators of emotional training, a poem dealing with loss has been selected for exemplification and assessment of students’ emotional literacy skills. The poem One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is a mirroring of the poet’s life and inner struggles and the strategy the poet adopts in order to master past memories. The entire poem seems to deliver the message that people should master life events with such poise that any act of losing may not create unbalance in the mind. The present study aimed at recording the impact of the poem on a group of 72 students from the Faculty of Letters of “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași. The students were asked to write a short literary analysis of the poem and refer to aspects related to the emotions the poet expresses and the attitudes she adopts to master them, the lexical means and the imagery used, as well as the impact of the emotions on themselves. The questions exposed the readers to the four relevant areas in the Four-Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence devised by psychologists John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey (Mayer, J. D., and Salovey, P., 1997, p. 11) and checked their competences of perception and appraisal of emotion, detecting the linguistic means of expressing emotions, emotion assimilation and facilitation of thinking, emotion understanding and emotion management. The responses offered by students convey a consistent view of their emotional intelligent profiles. All the four key components were gradually sensed in their responses and indicate a further need to consolidate competences especially in the areas of emotion understanding and management.

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