The Paper Nautilus

Marianne Moore is “one of American literature’s foremost poets” (“Marianne Moore.” Poetry Foundation.), recognized for her work as a Modernist poet in the Naturalist movement. She was a leading literary figure of her time, running in the same social circles as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few. “The Paper Nautilus” first became available to readers in the early 1940s, although it is unclear where. It was then published in 1967 in The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, a controversial publication because Moore made decisions and changes to poems to which some readers reacted negatively.

Elizabeth Bishop, a close friend and pupil of Moore’s, gifted her a paper nautilus shell, which she credits as being the subject of the poem. Moore’s background in biology and histology, both of which require a curiosity for the natural world, give her an eye for observation from both a scientific and naturalistic perspective, utilizing “a style and theory of representation based on the accurate depiction of detail” (Oxford Languages). “The Paper Nautilus” does this with an intimacy that appeals to both a sense of emotion and persistence, exploring devotion and separation affectionately close and also from a distance.