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Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) may not be widely known, but her credentials as a poet are extensive; in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s she maintained a loyal reader- ship. In total she produced 17 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; this unprecedented event merited a personal audience with the queen.In addition, 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 shows; her thoughtful comments on the wide range of issues discussed by the panelists were a favorite among viewers. 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's many admirers included Owen Barfield, Hilaire Belloc, Lord David Cecil, Philip Larkin, C. S. Lewis, Kathleen Raine, May Sarton, and Siegfried Sassoon. At her death in 1992, one writer claimed, "She came to enjoy perhaps the highest reputation of any living English woman poet of her century."Pitter's best poems focus on nature and the human condition, taking us to hidden or secret places, just beyond the material, to the meaning of life. Her poems are often the result of a heightened sense of felt experience-intuitive and evocative. If human life is lived behind a veil faintly obscuring reality, Pitter's poems often lift the edge of the veil.Sudden Heaven arranges Pitter's poems in chronological order, allowing readers to follow her maturation as a poet, and it features a number of poems that have never before appeared in print.

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	01 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631013218
Langue	English

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Sudden Heaven

Ruth Pitter, c. 1925. Photo by Win Murrell.
Sudden Heaven
The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter
A CRITICAL EDITION

Edited by Don W. King

The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
Publication of this volume is made possible in part through the generous support of Cameron La Follette, Mary Susan Fulgum, and The Friends of Montreat College Library.
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242 Poems and prose by Ruth Pitter are copyright © 2018 by Mark Pitter and are reprinted with permission. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-60635-345-5 Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
To Alyssa, Corrie, Emily, and Mary Willis
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chronology of Ruth Pitter’s Life (1897–1992)
First Poems
First and Second Poems
Persephone in Hades
A Mad Lady’s Garland
A Trophy of Arms
The Spirit Watches
The Rude Potato
The Bridge
On Cats
The Ermine
Still by Choice
End of Drought
A Heaven to Find
Other Poems
Appendix 1: A Return to Poetic Law
Appendix 2: Hunting the Unicorn
Appendix 3: There Is a Spirit
Notes
Chronological Bibliography of Ruth Pitter’s Poetry
Critical Bibliography
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Acknowledgments
I have many persons to thank for assistance in writing Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter, A Critical Edition. Dr. Judith Priestman, curator of the Bodleian Library’s literary manuscripts, has been a faithful supporter in all my efforts, as has her colleague, Colin Harris, superintendent of the Special Collections Reading Rooms. Elizabeth Pearson, the library director at Montreat College, together with her staff, especially Nathan King and Rebecca Shaw, have been endlessly patient and helpful in securing materials. I am grateful as well to Jeff Walden of the BBC Written Archives Centre. I thank Mark Pitter, Ruth Pitter’s nephew and literary executor; Mark has been ever helpful and encouraging, and I have fond memories of many visits to his home in Ludlow. I am grateful to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society for inviting me to speak on Pitter and for their helpful criticism, and I thank also the C. S. Lewis Foundation for permitting me to lead a week-long seminar at the Kilns during the summers of 2004 and 2009, where I introduced participants to Pitter through her letters and poems.
I owe debts of gratitude to Paul Maurer, president of Montreat College; the Faculty Scholarship Committee of Montreat College, for awarding me several summer research grants; and the Appalachian College Association, for awarding me two additional summer research grants. I also thank Cameron La Follette, Mary Susan Fulgum, and The Friends of Montreat College Library for their support. Thanks are due as well to my student research assistants: Emily Baker, Margaret Coe, Laura Davidson, Mary Willis Fife, Molly-Kate Garner, Corrie Greene, Mordecai Howard, Alyssa Klaus, and MacKenzie May. In addition, I have been encouraged to write this book by many of Pitter’s admirers, including Thomas McKean, Peter Dickinson, Helena Nelson, Morar Randolph, Ann Soutter, Walter Hooper, John Adams, Salwa Koddham, and Laura Cecil. Many thanks are also due to Joe Christopher and Diana Glyer, who read early versions of the manuscript and offered insightful comments and suggestions. I am most appreciative of the excellent editorial advice of Kent State University Press, especially Joyce Harrison, Marian Buda, and Will Underwood. Finally, I owe my wife, Jeanine, a great debt for her patience and understanding regarding the many hours spent away from her while working on this book.
All poems and prose by Ruth Pitter are used by permission of Mark Pitter. Pitter’s essay “Hunting the Unicorn” was delivered on February 17, 1961; it is used by permission of BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, Reading, England. Pitter’s manuscript notebooks, letters, essays, and other materials are held in thirty-nine boxes of uncatalogued papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, hereafter referred to as Pitter’s Papers.
Introduction
Sudden Heaven: The Collected Poems of Ruth Pitter culminates for me more than twenty years of research on Ruth Pitter. I had not heard of Pitter until the mid-1990s when I was researching and writing C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse. 1 I had already spent many hours in the Bodleian Library working on C. S. Lewis, Poet, when one day, during discussions with Judith Priestman, I learned that a biography of Pitter was long overdue. Judith urged me to begin researching Pitter’s life and work, and to my delight I found much to admire and appreciate. What followed was Hunting the Unicorn: A Critical Biography of Ruth Pitter (2008). 2 While not hagiography, Hunting the Unicorn was a genuine labor of love. Six years later, I followed with The Letters of Ruth Pitter: Silent Music (2014). 3 These two books set the stage for Sudden Heaven, the final book in what has become an unplanned trilogy.
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 seventeen volumes of new and collected verse. In 1937, her A Trophy of Arms (1936) was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry, and in 1954 she won the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, in 1955 she became the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; this unprecedented event merited a personal audience with the Queen. Furthermore, 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. In 1974, the Royal Society of Literature elected her a Companion of Literature, its highest honor, and in 1979 she received her last national award when she was appointed a Commander of the British Empire. 4
Critical evaluations of her poetry have always been favorable. In his preface to Pitter’s First and Second Poems, Hilaire Belloc praises her poetry as “an exceptional reappearance of the classical spirit amongst us.” He likens her verse to a strong stone building and argues that really good verse, “contrasted with the general run of that in the midst of which it appears, seems to me to have a certain quality of hardness; so that, in the long run, it will be discovered, as a gem is discovered in mud.” In her poetry, he finds “beauty and right order.” 5 Belloc also writes in his preface to Pitter’s A Mad Lady’s Garland that she has two peculiar poetic gifts: “A perfect ear and exact epithet. How those two ever get combined is incomprehensible—one would think it was never possible—but when the combination does appear then you have verse of that classic sort which is founded and secure of its own future.” 6 Rudolph Gilbert calls Pitter “the poet of purity” and notes “what the poetry reader values most in Pitter’s poems is her eloquence … In Pitter one almost looks through the language, as through air, discerning the exact form of the objects which stand there, and every part and shade of meaning is brought out by the sunny light resting upon them.” Later he adds: “She has a first-rate intuitive gift of observation, a control of poetic language and magical perception that is always to be found in great poetry.” 7 C. S. Lewis, who carried on an extensive correspondence with Pitter about poetry, often lavished praise on her verse. Regarding her Trophy of Arms (1936), for example, he writes that it “is enough for one letter for it has most deeply delighted me. I was prepared for the more definitely mystical poems, but not for this cool, classical quality. You do it time after time—create a silence and vacancy and awe all round the poem. If the Lady in Comus had written poetry one imagines it wd. have been rather like this.” 8
Pitter’s literary admirers eventually published the festschrift, Ruth Pitter: Homage to a Poet. There David Cecil—also one of her longtime correspondents—described her as “the most moving of living English poets, and one of the most original.” 9 John Arlott referred to her as “a poet’s poet,” while Thom Gunn noted that she “is the most modest of poets, slipping us her riches as if they were everyday currency.” 10 Kathleen Raine was even more generous in her praise: “I now see her as one of the poets whose best work will survive as long as the English language, with whose expressiveness in image and idea she has kept faith, remains.” 11 Other writers who praised Pitter in this festschrift included Edmund Blunden, Andrew Young, John Betjeman, Richard Church, Roy Fuller, Elizabeth Jennings, Carolyn Kizer, Ngaio Marsh, Robin Skelton, Hallam Tennyson, John Wain, and John Hall Wheelock. Furthermore, Philip Larkin, who edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, included four of her poems, noting that her poetry was “rather good.” 12 Larkin’s praise is noteworthy since he, like Pitter, wrote poetry in the vein of other traditional English poets, such as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman. Even after her death, critical praise continued. In her introduction to Pitter’s Collected Poems, Elizabeth Jennings, noting Pitter’s “acute sensibility and deep integrity,” describes her poems as “informed with a sweetness which is also bracing, and a generosity which is blind to nothing, neither the sufferings in this world nor the quirky behavior of human beings.” 13
In spite of this high regard, Pitter lived most of her life in relative obscurity, since she did not found a new school or participate in the modernist movement heralded by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Instead, she worked at her craft in a quiet, consistent, and deliberate fashion. She writes about this in “There is a Spirit,” the preface to