Although her small body of work included only 101 poems, Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) left behind one of the biggest footprints on 20th-century American literature. Among those poems, one of them not only came to be her most well-known work but also became one of the most famous examples of the villanelle.
A villanelle is notoriously difficult to write despite having two repeated lines that compose almost half of the poem. It’s this very repetition that makes it so difficult, because as the poem progresses, these two refrains should gather new shades of meaning.
