Anne Ridler

Anne Barbara Bradby, writer and poet: born Rugby, Warwickshire 30 July 1912; FRSL 1998; OBE 2001; married 1938 Vivian Ridler (two sons, two daughters); died Oxford 15 October 2001.

Anne Barbara Bradby, writer and poet: born Rugby, Warwickshire 30 July 1912; FRSL 1998; OBE 2001; married 1938 Vivian Ridler (two sons, two daughters); died Oxford 15 October 2001.

Anne Ridler was 89 when she died, and she leaves a remarkable literary legacy, from her first book, Poems (1939), to her verse translation of The Magic Flute (1996). Her Collected Poems was published in 1994, with a new edition in 1997. She is one of only two 20th-century women poets represented in Helen Gardner's 1972 Oxford Book of English Verse, and one of only eight in Christopher Ricks's new 1999 selection. In 1998 she won the Cholmondeley Prize for Poetry, administered by the Society of Authors, and in the Queen's Birthday Honours this year she was appointed OBE, for services to literature.

Besides her volumes of poetry she has a mass of other publications to her name. Dramatist, translator, editor and literary critic – her writings are characterised by an elegance of style and searching honesty.

Anne Ridler was a poet, and more than a poet. I last saw her about a year ago, cycling down the Iffley Road in Oxford, in atrocious weather and battling against a head wind. It seemed she thought advancing years no reason for her not getting about the city in the proper manner. "She's indomitable," I thought; and that word describes much about her character. Life does involve a lot of battling. She bore no grudge that that should be so. Battling against the elements is part of what we have to do. She loved writing about the sea –

. . . still the unseen monstrous waters pour
In centuries against the crumbling shore.

And she must have had to battle to make space to fulfil her vocation as a poet and a writer. She didn't take herself seriously. But she took her poetic mission seriously; time had to be carved out for that. Miraculously she always seemed to have time for others, not least to encourage the writing of younger poets. Yet one knew she knew all time is precious.

She was born in 1912, and educated at Downe House, Newbury (of which she later wrote an affectionate history, Olive Willis and Downe House, 1967), but her early years and education were frequently interrupted by illness. To compensate, she told Fiona Maddocks, interviewing her for The Independent in 1992 when she was 80, she read books – adventures by Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.

I wrote plenty of poetry at the time, but nothing I was remotely proud of, I didn't write anything I could call a proper poem until well into my twenties.

The adventure stories stood her in good stead some 50 years on when she found herself seated at dinner next to Archbishop Michael Ramsey, not always an easy conversationalist. I asked her how she had got on. "Fine," she said. "We talked mostly about Walter Scott."

After spending six months in Florence and Rome, she took a diploma in journalism (her ignorance of Latin as the result of missing so much schooling disqualified her for a conventional degree) at King's College London:

Actually, it was a way of studying English literature without the Anglo-Saxon and so on needed for a degree. It had almost nothing to do with journalism. We did have a few lectures from a man who had once been a sub-editor on The Times, but we regarded him as a joke.

She spent nine months in the British Museum Reading Room helping the poet Lascelles Abercrombie select an anthology of contemporary verse commissioned by Oxford University Press (and never completed) before finding a job at the publishers Faber and Faber. She worked there for five years, from 1935 to 1940, as a secretary and reader, and, for a while, was assistant to T.S. Eliot. "Eliot," she wrote, "first made me despair of becoming a poet . . . Auden . . . first made me think I saw how to become one." Eliot didn't publish her first book of poems (that was Oxford – she didn't offer it to him), nor her second (A Dream Observed, 1941: that was Tambimuttu at Poetry London) but did her third, The Nine Bright Shiners (1943).

No one could doubt how important family ties were to Anne Ridler. Her poems are full of references to kinsfolk. Her father, H.C. Bradby, was one of the Bradbys who became legendary figures at Rugby School. He was a housemaster there, and Anne was born in Rugby. Her mother, Violet Bradby, wrote and published children's stories, which were widely enjoyed. Violet had been a Milford. So her brother Humphrey Milford, who was Publisher to Oxford University for 32 years, was Anne's uncle. Another uncle, G.F. Bradby, was author of The Lanchester Tradition (1919), while her aunt Barbara (née Bradby) and uncle J.L. Hammond were joint authors of The Village Labourer (1911). And Anne's cousins included Robin Milford, the musician and composer, and Dick Milford, the scholarly Anglican cleric who was at one time an outstanding vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, which in due course Anne made her own spiritual home. Her great-grandfather was Charles Richard Sumner, Bishop of Winchester, younger brother of John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Above all in this extraordinary family network there was Vivian Ridler, the future Printer to Oxford University (1958-78) whom she married in 1938 when he was manager of the Bunhill Press in London, and their two daughters and two sons, who have earned much distinction in their own right. A number of Anne's poems touch on her relationship with Vivian. These are full of tenderness, affection and admiration. He is "gentle, wild and good". One poem tells of the agony of wartime separation, which for Anne was clearly one of life's battles. Another is entitled "Lines to a Retiring Printer":

. . . think, on pearly summer mornings
Tasting your freedom, think how still
The whirl and sweep goes on without you.
Tired committees gasp for air
While the Chapels issue warnings –
And you not there, and you not there!

Anne and Vivian were a perfect match. They were married for 63 years.

Anne Ridler had an intense love of music. I imagine her early studies of the violin were not carried very far – "Technical problems have always given me trouble; / A child stiff on the fiddle," she wrote. But for three decades she sang in the Oxford Bach Choir and her musical understanding was considerable. One of her poems is entitled "Bach's B Minor Mass" –

It is not to see all heaven before one's eyes
But to become the very stuff of heaven
To live within this music.

It was a natural step for her to produce opera libretti: she knew how to write words that could be sung. She collaborated with such distinguished composers as Elizabeth Maconchy (a great personal friend) and Bryan Kelly. Since the 1970s she had also become one of Britain's leading opera translators. For English National Opera, Opera Factory, Kent Opera and others she produced singing translations of most of Cavalli's operas, all those of Monteverdi, and four of Mozart's. Several of these productions have been televised.

Anne Ridler was as profoundly religious a person as I have ever met. Simply nothing could be thought about, or written about, without reference to God, explicit or, more often, implicit. She loved the Church of England. That was evident in her personal life. She and Vivian were regular Sunday worshippers at St Mary's in Oxford, the city to which they moved in 1948, enjoying the simplicity of the liturgy, the sermon when it was a good one, and the ordinary human contacts they found there, sometimes with the young, sometimes with much older people.

St Mary's provided much of the inspiration for, and was the setting for, two of Anne's dramatic works – The Trial of Thomas Cranmer (1956) and The King of the Golden River (1975), an adaptation of a Ruskin story providing words for Elizabeth Maconchy's music.

Anne Ridler seldom took the platform herself. But she once gave a memorable address in St Mary's on the language of worship, at a period when church congregations were having to consider whether to take part in the liturgical experiments of the time and try out the modern language of Series 3. She would never take the line of some literary purists, "no change at any price"; but she was always reverent, jealous of the Church's traditions. "By an inadequate style one fears to cheapen / Glory," she had once written.

Great attention will be paid to her poetic legacy in days to come, it must be hoped. Jon Stallworthy, himself an eminent poet and now Professor of English Literature at Oxford, characterises her as

a Christian poet, who movingly articulates the inner experiences of women, writing of love, married love, faith and having children, in a manner complex, witty and of great lyrical intensity. The special quality of some of her poems has been compared to the 17th-century poets, in particular to those of George Herbert: the way in which faith and doubt interact within the poems, and the poet is able to make a final affirmation, just because doubt has been looked at so powerfully.

Thirty-five years ago she edited the collected poems of Thomas Traherne. In one of her own later poems she returned to Traherne once more:

. . . there's no inconsistency; no curbs
Constrain the single vision of Traherne;
Eternity in all appearances,
The holiness of everything that is.

It is hard to imagine a more civilised, well-rounded and sensitive human being than Anne Ridler. And, if I were asked to suggest an epitaph for her, I'd be tempted to pillage some words of Traherne himself that are inscribed on his tablet in St Mary's Church, Credenhill, in Herefordshire. She

had a deep and perfect sense

Of all the glories and the pleasures

That in God's work are hid.

Ronald Gordon