Sheila Wingfield's considerable poetic achievement emerges from a life of contrasts. Born of an Irish mother and an English father, Wingfield had a privileged upbringing in London, but it was in Ireland that she met her future husband, the Honorable Mervyn Patrick Wingfield, heir to the Powerscourt estate in Co. Wicklow, whom she married in 1932. Six years later, Wingfield published her first volume, Poems, but her practice of writing had been established much earlier and reflects a life-long interest in the poetic process. Her early work shows a pronounced engagement with classical sources, but a syntactical clarity that appeals to the modern reader. In this respect, Wingfield is an inheritor of a modernist sensibility. Her work does not, however, exhibit modernist disjunctions of form; rather she creates a smoothness of style that belies challenging material. Her precision of expression remains the most distinctive aspect of her work. Her objective stance is particularly noteworthy, and is explained by Wingfield herself in these terms: ‘What is personally felt must be fused with what is being, and has been, felt by others.’ Her second book, Beat Drum, Beat Heart (1946), is a lengthy meditation on the experience of war. It was followed three years later by A Cloud Across the Sun, and in 1954 by a selection of old and new poems, A Kite's Dinner. By this time, Wingfield had moved away from her early epigrammatic style and embraced broader perspectives on place and history. Though some poems suggest affinities with the Irish landscape, especially to Wicklow and to Offaly, where she had spent time as a child, this is leavened by her engagement with other cultures and peoples. She is not a poet firmly located in place but one who values the dynamic between minute observation and wide-ranging intellectual connection. In later years she became discouraged by the failure of her work to make an impact on the British literary scene. Two later volumes of poems, Her Storms (1974) and Admissions: 1974–1977 (1977), were published in Ireland by Dolmen Press.