I.M. BIRTWISTLE, lyric poet and gallery owner, had been anticipating meeting her maker for some years. “Probably our last season, so be sure to visit” the sign outside her north Norfolk art gallery read. It coaxed many intrigued passers-by in, as she intended, but had been up for so long that it started to deteriorate round the edges. She never did. Her passion for art, music and poetry remained fierce until the end and infected all who came into contact with her.

Her success in championing through her various galleries — first in Walberswick in Suffolk, then in Ipswich and finally at Burnham Deepdale in Norfolk — artists such as Mary Potter, Mary Newcomb, Jeffrey Camp, Philip Sutton and the sculptor, Rosalind Stracey, all of them now established in the canon of 20th-century British art, was remarkable. The young David Hockney was another who caught her attention. She would sell his drawings for a fiver before anyone had heard of him.

Her achievement was all the more noteworthy for two reasons. First, she had no time for fancy premises. In Walberswick she traded out of an old battery hen hut, bought for £25, which she put in the middle of her garden. And then in Norfolk, she housed part of her gallery in a caravan that she had once used to store her sons’ sailing gear. “It’s what you put in it that counts,” she used to say. She would defend her choice of premises but she also knew such disregard for convention made her stand out.

Secondly, she carried on promoting young up-and-coming artists such as Petrina Ferry, Phil Tyler and Jenny Smith, winner of Scotland’s top award for young painters, even after her eyesight began to fail through hereditary glaucoma at the age of 49. For the last 15 years of her working life she was blind. Good paintings, she had always believed, had a spiritual dimension and in her hour of need she found they could speak to her. After being told the subject and the size of a painting, she would hold it and make a judgment. “Either they had a visual weight or they didn’t,” was all she would say of the process.

There were moments of self-doubt about this almost mystical communication when she wondered if she was fooling herself, but her customers believed her ability to spot painters with genuine and unusual talent remained undimmed despite her loss of sight. “Don’t go to this gallery unless you appreciate the qualities of good art,” wrote the Art Review of her eccentric set-up. “Mrs Birtwistle is an enthusiast and takes no prisoners.”

That enthusiasm for art had come second, when she was a young woman, to her enthusiasm for poetry. After wartime service as first an ambulance driver and then as an officer in the WRNS, she quickly established quite a reputation as a lyric poet in the late 1940s and early 1950s. T. S. Eliot was an admirer. Robert Graves invited her to stay in Majorca. Muriel Spark published her in Forum and turned to Birtwistle, a cradle Catholic, when she was contemplating going over to Rome.

Birtwistle herself always claimed that her admirers had overestimated her talent as a poet. “I love my poems as a mother loves her children,” she said, “so I can also see their flaws.” Soon poetry, however, was forced to give way to motherhood when she decided, although unmarried, to adopt three boys. Writing and raising children were, she decided, both full-time occupations and she couldn’t do both. She moved to Walberswick, briefly tried her hand at portrait photography and then set up her gallery, seeking out the best of the new generation emerging from art school and giving them their first platform. Some remained with her for life.

As her assistant in the gallery, she had the young Jennifer Lash, who came, aged 17, to stay with her for a weekend and ended up remaining for five years. Birtwistle introduced Lash to a handsome young local farmer, Mark Fiennes. They fell in love, married and had six children, including the actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes and the directors Martha and Sophie Fiennes. Lash dedicated her first novel, The Burial, to her surrogate mother and her children retained a special affection for Birtwistle ever after.

Iris Birtwistle was born into a family of mill owners at Houghton House near Blackburn, in 1918. The house boasted priest holes from the times of the post-Reformation persecution of Catholics. As a child she and her siblings would play catechumens and heretics in the rhododendron bushes and stage mock Communion services with peppermints instead of wafers.

She never cared for her Christian name. Close friends called her Lilla. Professionally she was I. M. Birtwistle. She overcame parental objections to study in the late 1930s at the Bauhaus-influenced Reimann Art School in London. One day she heard the Australian theologian and publisher, Frank Sheed, speaking at Hyde Park Corner about his Catholic faith, and his commitment inspired her to redouble her own.

She remained a devout Catholic throughout her long life, though in old age she wrote in an essay published in the 2004 collection, Why I am still a Catholic, that she still had doubts. “You reach a point where you realise that you can no longer have black without white. You can’t really have belief unless there is, somewhere in the dark regions, an undertow of disbelief and questioning.”

She spoke passionately about the spiritual life as she did about everything she cared for. One visitor to her gallery who engaged her in conversation on the subject was the rock musician Nick Cave. They became close friends and the link between them — which Cave referred to when writing a Lenten reflection for The Times — brought a fresh wave of interest in Birtwistle and her work just when she was beginning to feel forgotten in Norfolk.

She welcomed all comers, as long as they didn’t commit the cardinal sin of boring her by inquiring after her health. Sitting in her gallery in her fedora, dark glasses and elaborate rings, she gave the unobservant few clues that she couldn’t see. But being blind, she once remarked, was akin to being buried alive. Birtwistle, however, refused to accept such a fate and in her unceasing battle inspired and enlightened those who came into contact with her.

I. M. Birtwistle, lyric poet and gallery owner, was born on May 29, 1918. She died on June 20, 2006, aged 88.

A PRODIGAL RETURN

Tired of the stable talk, the swill,
I dream a prodigal return
And hang my linen in the sun.
These acrid hands ingrained with dung
Shall seek the cast shoe in the plough,
A poppy sweat resolves the corn
Where, like a wanton sheaf,
I lean towards my ends –
O glean me swiftly, Lord.