Anne Ridler Biography

British poet, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, educated at King's College, the University of London. She worked in the editorial department of Faber and Faber from 1935 to 1940, after which she was fully occupied with motherhood and writing. Her first collection of verse was Poems (1939); subsequent volumes include The Nine Bright Shiners (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1959), Some Time After (1972), New and Selected Poems (1988), and Collected Poems (1994). Much of her finest poetry projects the insights of a visionary religious sensibility into treatments of familial and domestic experience. Ridler also wrote a number of plays, notably the versedrama The Trial of Thomas Cranmer (1956), and The Jesse Tree (1972), a masque in verse with music by Elizabeth Maconchy. Among her other works are the biography Olive Willis and Downe House (1967) and English libretti for operas by Monteverdi, Cavalli, Cesti, Handel, and Mozart. She has edited numerous books, including a collection of Charles Williams's essays entitled The Image of the City (1958), and Poems and Letters of James Thomson (1963).