Although Ruth Pitter (1897 1992) is not well known, her credentials
as a poet are extensive, and in England from the mid-1930s to the
mid-1970s she maintained a modest yet loyal readership. In total
she produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse. Her A
Trophy of Arms (1936) won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937,
and in 1954 she was awarded the William E. Heinemann Award for The
Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, she became the first woman to
receive the Queen s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955. Furthermore,
from 1946 to 1972 she was often a guest on BBC radio and television
programs, In 1974 The Royal Society of Literature elected her to
its highest honor, a Companion of Literature, and in 1979 she
received her last national award when she was appointed a Commander
of the British Empire. Pitter was a voluminous letter writer. Her
friends and correspondents read like a Who s Who of
twentieth-century British literary luminaries, including AE (George
Russell), A. R. Orage, Hiliare Belloc, Walter de la Mare, Julian
Huxley, John Masefield, Phillip and Ottoline Morrell, George
Orwell, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, James Stephens,
Dorothy L. Sayers, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Sackville-West,
Dorothy Wellesley, Lord David Cecil, John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh,
John Wain, Kathleen Raine, and May Sarton. Stylistically Pitter s
letters are marked by crisp prose, precise imagery, and elegant
simplicity reflecting a well-read and vigorous mind lithe, curious,
penetrating, analytical, and perceptive. Of more her more than one
thousand letters covering the years 1908-1988, I publish here a
generous selection. I believe these selected letters go a long way
toward illustrating Pitter s desire to reach a public interested in
her as both a poet and personal commentator. These letters offer an
understanding of the silent music, the dance in stillness, the
hints and echoes and messages of which everything is full reflected
in her life and poetry. In total they provide an essential
introduction to the work of this neglected twentieth-century poet."
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