She was the first woman to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955, and was appointed CBE in 1979 to honour her many contributions to English literature.
[4] Pitter was employed at the War Office from 1915 to 1917, later working as a painter at a furniture company in Suffolk, Walberswick Peasant Pottery Co., where she remained until 1930.
[6] Later, Pitter and her lifelong good friend, Kathleen O'Hara, operated Deane and Forester, a small firm that specialised in decorative, painted furniture.
Pitter was a traditionalist poet; she avoided most of the experimentations of modern verse and preferred the meter and rhyme schemes of the 19th century.
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.Because of this, Pitter was frequently overlooked by critics of her day, and has only in recent years been seen as important:[citation needed] her reputation was helped by Larkin's respect for her poetry (he included four of her poems in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse).
For much of my life I lived more or less as a Bohemian, but when the second war broke out, Lewis broadcast several times, and also published some little books (notably "The Screwtape Letters"), and I was fairly hooked.
Straight prayer book Anglican, nothing fancy [...] I realize what a tremendous thing it is to take on, but I can't imagine turning back.