1 - Paper Replicas: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
Summary
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In her memoir of Marianne Moore, ‘Efforts of Affection’, which she wrote after Moore's death in 1972 but never published, Elizabeth Bishop remarked how a nautilus shell was one of the most ‘successful’ gifts she had given to Marianne Moore, becoming later the subject of her poem ‘The Paper Nautilus’ (CEPr, 126). This in all likelihood is the same nautilus shell that Bishop's lover and companion at the time, Louise Crane, presented to Marianne Moore in February 1937 – a gift which Bishop would probably have chosen – and for which Crane received an intricately worded thank you note:
A nautilus has always seemed to me something supernatural. The more I look at it the less I can credit it, – this large yet weightless thing, with a glaze like ivory on the entrance and even on the sides. How curious the sudden change of direction in the corrugations, and the transparent oyster white dullness of the “paper.” The wings are so symmetrical I should not know any part had been broken if you had not said so.
At this time Bishop was living in temporary lodgings in Florida – the next year she and Crane would buy a house together in Key West – and it was proving a fruitful new territory for her imagination. As well as drafts of poems and prose, she would frequently send Moore gifts, mostly to do with their shared appreciation of ‘found’ natural objects.
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- Elizabeth BishopLines of Connection, pp. 9 - 31Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013