“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” begins Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” followed by a recounting of her losses, which include “three loved houses.” Now Key West Literary Seminar, a literature nonprofit that has championed the writer’s work, is paying $1.2 million for the first of those houses, which she lived in for nearly a decade. It plans to use the Key West house as its headquarters. Arlo Haskell, the nonprofit’s executive director, called Bishop, who died in 1979, its “guiding spirit.” The organization devoted its 1993 seminar entirely to her writing, and more recently it has incorporated her letters, poems and photographs into its programming for young people. Bishop bought the house, located at 624 White St., when she moved to Key West in 1938. It has been privately owned since she sold it in 1946,
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