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Patricia Beer

Patricia Beer (4 November 1919 – 15 August 1999) was an English poet and critic. Born to a family of Plymouth Brethren, a strict religious order, she took inspiration for her poetry from there, with particular influence from her mother who instilled the religion into her from a young age. Exposure to death during childhood also influenced her work. She earned a Bachelor of Letters degree at the University of Oxford, after which she taught in Italy for seven years. Returning to England, she began to publish poetry in 1959, and wrote full-time since 1968. Near her death, she was a candidate to replace Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. Beer died in Upottery in Devon on 15 August 1999.

Beer's poetry style began as neo-romanticism, but she departed from it as her career progressed. ''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'' cites the background and legends of West Country as an influence in her poetry. Harry Blamires compared her work to W. B. Yeats for the way it "sucks the reader into the heart of compulsive inner argument and self-scrutiny", while Michael Schmidt, founder of ''P. N. Review'', compared her to Stanley Spencer in her lucidity and canny innocence. Her 1974 ''Reader, I Married Him'', in which she found Jane Austen's women characters to be wanting due to their chasing marriage, represented feminism's early impact on academic criticism. Provided by Wikipedia