Anne Ridler, who died on October 15th aged 89, was awarded an OBE for services to literature last June, two years after receiving the Cholmondeley award for poetry at the Royal Society of Authors. These tokens of recognition came late in a career, the latter part of which had been devoted to translating librettos, including a modern interpretation of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, as much as writing poetry.
Yet earlier in her life, Anne Ridler had mixed with Lawrence Durrell, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, and had worked with T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, who published many of her books. Her poetry was in every anthology of the 1940s.
Born on July 30th, 1912, the daughter of a house-master at Rugby, Anne Ridler suffered from illness during her childhood and education at Downe House School, near Newbury, Berkshire, though this did mean that she read a great deal, Walter Scott proving to be an early favourite. In 1932, she took a diploma in journalism at King's College London; as she later said, this provided "a way of studying English literature without the Anglo-Saxon and so on required for a degree".
For nine months in 1933, she worked on an anthology for the poet Lascelles Abercrombie, and mixed with writers on the London scene, particularly Durrell, with whom she used to watch Marx Brothers films.
She modestly attributed her employment at Fabers to her literary connections: in 1934, she started working there for Walter de la Mare's son, Richard; in 1935, she became assistant to Eliot, helping him with the Criterion, which he was editing, and reading submitted manuscripts, a task she continued to perform long after leaving the firm in 1940.
It was her husband Vivian Ridler, a typographer and printer, who printed her first volume, Poems (1939), for Oxford University Press, using a small press which he was managing in Bunhill Row, London. Her next publication was a pamphlet commissioned by Tambimuttu, the exuberant Ceylonese editor of Poetry London.
Eliot had encouraged Anne Ridler's early writing, and agreed to publish her next substantial volume, A Dream Observed (1941).
Like almost all poets of the period, she was influenced by Eliot, who, she famously remarked, "first made me despair of being a poet", adding that it was Auden "who first made me think I saw how to become one". Her other influences included Sir Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Traherne, the metaphysicals and Charles Williams.
Anne Ridler's poetry displayed an attention to cadence and musicality in both her formal and her free verse, and managed to combine a Christian spirituality and Latinate, Elizabethan elegance with a more modern, even sceptical, tone. While some poems are overtly religious - Carol To Be Set To Music and Prayer In A Pestilent Time - she would more often situate her everyday subjects in contexts of both faith and doubt.
She was also capable of eroticism and tenderness; for example, in At Parting, written to her husband Vivian, who joined the RAF during the second World War:
Since we through war awhile
must part
Sweetheart, and learn to lose
Daily use
Of all that satisfied our heart:
Lay up those secrets and those
powers
Wherewith you pleased and
cherished me these two years:
. . . I have no words to tell you
what you were,
But when you are sad, think,
Heaven could give no more.
During the war, and for a while afterwards, Anne Ridler was a fashionable poet. She was awarded the Oscar Blumenthal prize in 1954, and the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation prize in 1955. Later - and certainly after Eliot's death in 1965 - she tended to be overlooked. Poems would occasionally appear in anthologies - generally the same few early poems - but her subsequent volumes attracted little attention until Michael Schmidt, the editor of Carcanet, laudably published her Collected Poems in 1994.
She also turned to verse plays, under the influence (but not at the suggestion) of Eliot. Eliot's producer, Martin Browne, had turned his actors into the Pilgrim Players, who toured villages and towns which would otherwise have been denied theatre during the war. Anne Ridler offered her own work to them, and her first play, The Shadow Factory: A Nativity Play, was subsequently performed at the Mercury Theatre in 1945, and published in 1946. Half-a-dozen other verse dramas were performed in Oxford and London.
In 1948, Anne Ridler and her family moved to Oxford, where her husband worked for Oxford University Press, becoming printer to the university from 1958-78. She edited a number of texts and critical studies, wrote more poems and verse plays, and continued to read for Faber.
In the 1970s, she turned her hand to librettos. She translated several operas by Monteverdi and Mozart. Her version of Cosi fan tutte, by Opera Factory, was televised by Channel 4 in 1988; a slightly risque version, set on a beach. It is a highly regarded translation, still performed.
Anne Ridler was attractively modest about her achievements, and admirably stoic about the ebbs and flows of critical attention. Receiving her OBE, she said she was surprised cause she "hadn't had any particular activity lately", but that it was "nice to have it".
Anne Ridler is survived by her husband, whom she married in 1938, sons, Benedict and Colin, and daughters, Jane and Kate.
Anne Barbara Ridler: born 1912; died, October 2001