American poet and short story writer Elizabeth Bishop lived between February 8, 1911 and October 6, 1979. She won many awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Award of the Book and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. It was said that Bishop worked obsessively on her poems and would spend years perfecting them. Two of the many poems she wrote were "One Art" (a poem about a woman who says we can master the art of losing) and "The Waiting Room" (a speaker describing her experience as a young girl reading the National Geographic magazine, taking place in February 1918). Elizabeth implicitly used both poems to demonstrate how people are connected by their own vulnerability. Everyone has emotions when faced with certain images or certain situations in life. These emotions can make a person terrified of what they actually feel. In “One Art,” Elizabeth begins the poem “The art of losing is not difficult to master. » (1.1, 2.6, 4.12), the speaker of the poem wants us to believe that we can lose things without having an emotional connection to it. By practicing loss, she feels we can control it, but losing and having an emotional response to loss is a human thing. It's like she's afraid to admit that the loss in her life has affected her. In “The Waiting Room,” Elizabeth, a young girl, whether a poet herself or a speaker she invented, was surprised by what she felt. “What took me/completely by surprise/was that it was my voice in my mouth. » (44-47), when Elizabeth hears her aunt screaming from the dentist's office, she has the impression that it is she who is screaming, as if they were living this painful experience together. Even though her aunt wasn't there looking at the magazine with her, her response described how she felt inside because of the images she was... middle of paper ..... Bishop doesn't clearly show the common ways people connect. In her poems, she demonstrates a unique concept of how people connect through vulnerability, fear of the unknown, and fear of their true emotions. By sharing these fears and real emotions, people connect on a deeper level. The idea that we open ourselves up to tell someone how we feel or what has scared us is a gateway we open up to show our true selves. Showing our true selves is an experience that will stay with us forever, but be wise to whoever you choose to open up to. Works Cited Bishop, Elizabeth. “One art”. Literature: a portable anthology. Ed. Gardener, Janet et al. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013. 455. PrintBishop, Elizabeth. Literature “The waiting room”: a portable anthology. Ed. Gardener, Janet et al. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St.Martins, 2013. 455. Print