Patricia Beer has written no single volume of poems longer than fifty pages, but her lyric economy has earned her poems a place in D. J. Enright's selective The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, 1945-1980 (1980) and Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973). Her literary criticism articulates her commitment to poetic craft, and she is widely regarded as a skillful technician who, despite some similarities with the formalist poets of the Movement in the 1950s, has developed her own distinctive voice.

Born in Exmouth, Devonshire, on 4 November 1919, she was the second daughter of Andrew Beer, a railway clerk, and Harriet Jeffrey Beer, a former schoolteacher. In Mrs. Beer's House (1968), she has written an account of the first fourteen years of her life, describing many early experiences that resurface in her poetry: membership in the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist sect which stressed personal salvation through faith; a...