Collected Poems

This volume gathers together the finest of Ruth Pitter’s poems, which in Kathleen Raine’s judgement ‘will survive as long as the English language, with whose expressiveness in image and idea she has kept faith, remains’. In the introduction Elizabeth Jennings – who was herself among the most distinguished of contemporary poets – pays tribute to Pitter’s ‘acute sensibility and deep integrity’ and refers to her precision in observing Nature, her skill with verse forms and the frequency with which she achieves a ‘beautifully communicated vision’.

Ruth Pitter was born at Ilford in 1897. Her mother and father were both teachers in the East End, and introduced her at an early age to poetry and to an enjoyment of the countryside on the edge of London. Her first poems appeared in print in A.R Orage's New Age when she was still at Coborn School for Girls, Bow. Hilaire Belloc helped to publish her First Poems in 1920, and subsequent volumes established her reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century poetry: her work was praised by Yeats and C.S. Lewis, and she was described by Lord David Cecil as ‘the most moving of living English poets, and one of the most original’. A younger generation of writers, among them Thom Gunn and John Wain, was equally enthusiastic. Ruth Pitter received the Hawthornden Prize in 1937, the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1954 and was the first woman recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955. She was made a Companion of Literature in 1974 and a C.B.E. in 1979. For many years she earned her living as a painter of furniture and of ornamental trays; after retiring to Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, she took up gardening and became known to a wide audience through the TV Brains Trust. She died on 29 February 1992.