Ruth Pitter

Ruth Pitter (1897-1992). Courtesy The History of Long Crendon.

Emma Thomas "Ruth" Pitter CBE FRSL (7 November 1897 - 29 February 1992) was an English poet .

Life

Pitter was born in Ilford, Essex. She worked in the War Office from 1915 to 1917, later working as a painter at a furniture company in Suffolk, Walberswick Peasant Pottery Co., where she was employed until 1930. In Suffolk, she befriended Richard and Ida Blair ( the parents of George Orwell) at Southwold, and later helped Orwell find lodgings in London in 1927, taking a vague interest in his writing, of which she was generally critical.

Later, Pitter and her life-long good friend, Kathleen O'Hara, operated Deane & Forester, a small firm that specialized in decorative, painted furniture. The business closed when World War II began. Pitter took work in a factory. After the war, she and O'Hara opened a small business painting trays. Pitter was skillful at the flower-painting used in both furniture and tray decorating.

From 1946 to 1972, she was often a guest on BBC radio programs, and from 1956 to 1960, she appeared regularly on the BBC's The Brains Trust, one of the first television talk programs.

Career

Pitter in old age. Courtesy The Poetry Archive.

Pitter began writing poetry early in life under the influence of her parents, George and Louisa (Murrell) Pitter, both primary schoolteachers. In 1920, she published her first book of poetry with the help of Hilaire Belloc. Despite her business and factory work, Pitter managed to spend a few hours a day writing poetry.

She went on to publish 18 volumes of new and collected verse over a 70-year career as a published poet. Many of her volumes met with some critical and financial success.

Christian faith influences

Pitter described her spiritual debt to C.S. Lewis:

As to my faith, I owe it to C.S. Lewis. For much of my life I lived more or less as a Bohemian, but when the second war broke out, Lewis broadcast several times, and also published some little books (notably "The Screwtape Letters"), and I was fairly hooked. I came to know him personally, and he came here several times. Lewis's stories, so very entertaining but always about the war between good and evil, became a permanent part of my mental and spiritual equipment.

Did I tell you I'd taken to Christianity? Yes, I went & got confirmed a year ago or more. I was driven to it by the pull of C.S. Lewis and the push of misery. Straight prayer book Anglican, nothing fancy [...] I realize what a tremendous thing it is to take on, but I can't imagine turning back. It cancels a great many of one's miseries at once, of course: but it brings great liabilities, too.

Writing

Pitter was a formalist poet — she avoided most of the experimentations of modern verse and preferred the meter and rhyme schemes of the 19th century. One critic has described her and her poetry thus:

Pitter, in contrast to T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W.H. Auden, is a traditional poet in the line of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, W.B. Yeats, and Philip Larkin. Unlike the modernists, she rarely experiments with meter or verse form, nor does she explore modernist themes or offer critiques of modern English society. Instead, she works with familiar meters and verse forms, and her reluctance to alter her voice to follow in the modernist line explains in part why critics have overlooked her poetry. She is not trendy, avant-garde, nor, thankfully, impenetrable.

Because of this, Pitter was frequently overlooked by critics of her day, and has only in recent years been seen as important. Her reputation was helped by Larkin's respect for her poetry.

She was a good friend of C.S. Lewis, who admired her poetry and once said, according to his friend and biographer George Sayer, that if he was the kind of man who got married, he would have wanted to marry Ruth Pitter. In correspondence between the two, Lewis often critiqued her work and made suggestions. Pitter is considered by many Lewis scholars to have had an effect on his writing in the 1940s and 1950s.

W.B. Yeats, Robin Skelton and Thom Gunn appreciated Pitter's work and praised her poetry. Lord David Cecil once remarked that Pitter was among the most original and moving poets then living.

Recognition

In 1955, Pitter became the earliest woman to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Philip Larkin included 4 of her poems in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973).

In 1974, she was named a "Companion of Literature", the highest honor given by the Royal Society of Literature.

She was appointed a Companion of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 in honor of her contributions to English literature.

Pitter's work continues to be published in anthologies, such as:

• The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry, edited by Fleur Adcock (London: Faber, 1987, where "The Sparrow's Skull" and "Morning Glory" appear (77-78)
• More Poetry Please! 100 Popular Poems from the BBC Radio 4 Programme (London: Everyman, 1988), where "The Rude Potato" appears (101-02)
• The Oxford Book of Garden Verse, edited by John Dixon Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), where "The Diehards" and "Other People's Glasshouses" appear (236-41)
• The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, 2nd ed., edited by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar (New York: [[W.W. Norton & Company|Norton, 1996), where "The Military Harpist," "The Irish Patriarch," "Old Nelly's Birthday," and "Yorkshire Wife's Saga" appear (1573–77)
• The New Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by Paul Keegan (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2000), where "But for Lust" appears (962)

Publications

Poetry

• First Poems (preface by Hillaire Belloc). London: Cecil Palmer, 1920.
• First and Second Poems. London: Sheed & Ward, 1927.
• Persephone in Hades (narrative poem). privately printed, 1931
  • (illustrated by Alan Dixon). Glenrothes, Fife, UK: HappenStance, 2007.
• A Mad Lady's Garland. London: Cresset Press, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1935.
• Trophy of Arms: Poems, 1926-1935. London: Cresset Press, 1936.
• The Spirit Watches. London: Cresset Press, 1939; New York: Macmillan, 1940.
• The Rude Potato (illustrated by Roger Furse). London: Cresset Press, 1941.
• Poem. Southampton, UK: John Arlott / Shirley Press, 1943.
• The Bridge. Poems, 1939-1944. London: Cresset Press, 1945; New York: Macmillan, 1946..
• On Cats. London: Cresset Press, 1946.
• Urania London: Cresset Press, 1950. (selections from A Trophy of Arms, The Spirit Watches, & The Bridge}
• The Ermine: Poems, 1942-1952. London: Cresset Press, 1953.
• Still by Choice. London: Cresset Press, 1966.
• Collected Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1968; Petersfield, Hampshire, UK: Enitharmon, 1990.
• Poems, 1926-1966. London: Barrie & Rockcliff / Cresset Press, 1968.
• End of Drought. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1975.
• A Heaven to Find. London: Enitharmon, 1987.
• Collected Poems (edited by Elizabeth Jennings). London: Enitharmon, 1996.
• Selected Poems. Glenrothes, Fife, UK: HappenStance, 2010.

Juvenile

• The Plain Facts: by a plain but amiable cat (illustrated by Joan Hassell). London: Joan Hassall, 1948.

'Stormcock in Elder' by Ruth Pitter

Letters

• Letters of Ruth Pitter: Silent music (edited by Don King). Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2014.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• "The Plain Facts, by a plain but amiable cat"
• Ruth Pitter at AllPoetry (3 poems)

Audio / video

• Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) at The Poetry Archive
• Ruth Pitter at YouTube

Books

• Ruth Pitter at Amazon.com

About

• Ruth Pitter CBE (1897-1992) at The History of Long Crendon
• Don W. King on Ruth Pitter, interview
• The Ruth Pitter Project at Montreat College
• Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter