POEMS Still by Choice (Proof Copy)

London: The Cresset Press, 1965. First Edition. Paperback. Very Good. RARE PROOF COPY. Bluish gray soft cover binding.  35 pp. VG with browning at the edges. The proof copy of this book is scarce.Though she spent much time painting furniture, it was her poetry that made Pitter famous.  She was friends of the like of George Orwell and Hilaire Belloc and she was a recipient of many literary awards.  Though respected, twentieth century academia did not give her the laurels she deserved.  Don King explains why: "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 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."She was a good friend of C. S. Lewis who sometimes critiqued her poems for her.  But most of the critique went the other way with Pitter having a positive effect on Lewis' writing of the 1940s and 50s.  The influence of Lewis contributed to Pitter's conversion to Christianity.  Lewis, at the height of his bachelorhood, remarked that if he were the marrying kind, he would want to marry Ruth Pitter. Full refund if not satisfied. Shelley and Son Books specializes in C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien & the Inklings.