Elaine grew up in Leicester, in central England. She wrote her first poems as a schoolgirl and found the publication of one of them to be life-changing.

“The excitement of seeing that poem in the school magazine hooked me for life in an addiction as dangerous as any other,” she wrote in her memoir.

Just as formative was the time, when she was 6 or 7, that her father failed to pick her up at school as usual. Traumatized, she made her way home alone and discovered an ambulance there, taking her mother away. Her mother had had a life-threatening miscarriage, and Elaine had been forgotten in the panic.

“I suppose this was when I first realized I would have to confront the world on my own,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 1994. “Perhaps it’s as well for a protected child to be shaken awake like that, to realize that the world is out there, dangerous and ready to impinge.”

In 1949 she was admitted to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she earned an English degree in 1952 and a master’s degree three years later. She married Arnold Feinstein, a molecular biologist, in 1956. They lived in Cambridge for many years, hosting well-known writers at their home as Ms. Feinstein became more prominent in the literary world.

She was on the editorial staff of Cambridge University Press in the early 1960s and taught at several institutions. In 1966 she published her first poetry collection, “In a Green Eye,” and she brought out new volumes regularly for the next four decades; her 12th, “Cities,” was published in 2010.