Patricia Beer


Patricia Beer was an English poet and critic.
She was born in Exmouth, Devon into a family of Plymouth Brethren. Her mother died when she was fourteen and it affected her entire life and the way she saw death. Patricia Beer was strongly influenced by the Plymouth Brethren Church, a loosely structured, fundamentalist sect. She attended Exmouth Grammar School before reading English at Exeter University. Beer moved away from her religious background as a young adult, becoming a teacher and academic. She took her B.Litt at the University of Oxford following which she spent seven years in Italy where she taught English Literature at the University of Padua, the British Institute and the Ministero Aeronautica in Rome.
She began to write poetry after World War II, while living in Italy; she is most often classified as a 'New Romantic' poet comparable to John Heath-Stubbs. On her own account, however, there is a discontinuity in her work. Devon is a major presence. Beer returned to England in 1953 where she became Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths' College at the University of London. From the later 1960s she wrote full-time. She edited several significant anthologies, broadcast, and contributed to literary reviews.
She was married twice; first in 1960 to the writer P. N. Furbank, and then in 1964 to John Damien Parsons, an architect, settling in Upottery, near Honiton, England.

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