Walter de la Mare

Walter John de la Mare OM CH (April 25, 1873 – June 22, 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist, probably best remembered for his works for children and for his poem "The Listeners".

Life
Walter de la Mare was born in Kent (at 83 Maryon Road, Charlton, now part of the London Borough of Greenwich), descended from a family of French Huguenots, and was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School.

He was born to James Edward de la Mare, a clerk at the bank of England, and Lucy Sophia Browning (James' second wife), daughter of Scottish naval surgeon and author Dr Colin Arrott Browning. The assertion that Lucy was related to poet Robert Browning has been found to be incorrect. He had two brothers, Francis Arthur Edward and James Herbert ('Bert'), and four sisters Florence Mary, Constance Eliza, Ethel (who died in infancy), and Ada Mary ('Poppy'). De la Mare was known as Jack by his family and friends as he hated the name Walter.

In 1892, De la Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met and fell in love with Elfrida (Elfie) Ingpen, the leading lady. Elfie was ten years older than De la Mare. On August 4, 1899 De la Mare and Elfie, who was by then pregnant, were married. They went on to have 4 children - Richard Herbert Ingpen ('Dick'), Colin, Florence and Lucy Elfrida ('Jinnie') de la Mare. Their house at Anerley was the scene of many parties, notable for imaginative games of charades.

His first book, Songs of Childhood, was published under the name Walter Ramal. He worked in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil for eighteen years while struggling to bring up a family, but nevertheless found enough time to write, and, in 1908, through the efforts of Sir Henry Newbolt he received a Civil List pension which enabled him to concentrate on writing.

From 1912 through 1922 he was published in the five Georgian Poetry anthologies. In 1923, he edited his own anthology, Come Hither an anthology mostly of poetry with some prose. It has a frame story, and can be read on several levels. The 1923 edition was a success, and further editions followed. It also provides a selection of the leading Georgian poets (from de la Mare's perspective). It is arguably also the best account of their 'hinterland', documenting thematic concerns and a selection of their predecessors.

De la Mare also wrote some subtle psychological horror stories; "Seaton's Aunt" and "Out of the Deep" are noteworthy examples.

In 1940 Elfie was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and spent the rest of her life as an invalid, eventually dying in 1943. From 1940 until his death, De la Mare lived in Montpelier Row, Twickenham, the same street where Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson had lived a century earlier. In 1947 he suffered from coronary thrombosis and died of another in 1956.

The imagination
De la Mare described two distinct "types" of imagination, although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. It was at the border between the two that Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.

De la Mare claimed that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. In his lecture, "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination," he argued that children "are not so closely confined and bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons ... They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." Doris Ross McCrosson summarizes this passage, "Children are, in short, visionaries." This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality (or, in a limited sense, both).

The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which "retires like a shocked snail into its shell." From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes, the "intellectual, analytical type."

By adulthood (de la Mare proposed), the childlike imagination has either retreated for ever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of the spectrum of adult minds: the mind molded by the boylike is "logical" and "deductive". That shaped by the childlike becomes "intuitive, inductive." De la Mare's summary of this distinction is, "The one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty." Another way he puts it is that the visionary's source of poetry is within, while the intellectual's sources are without - external - in "action, knowledge of things, and experience," as McCrosson puts it. De la Mare hastens to add that this does not make the intellectual's poetry any less good, but it is clear where his own preference lies.

A note to avoid confusion: The term "imagination" in the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination" is used to refer to both the intellectual and the visionary. To simplify and clarify his language, de la Mare generally used the more conventional "reason" and "imagination" when discussing the same idea elsewhere.

Writer Joan Aiken cites some of his short stories such as Almond Trees and Snow Mountains for their sometimes unexplained quality, which she also employs in her own work.

Supernaturalism
De la Mare was also a significant writer of ghost stories. John Clute comments that "in his long career, De la Mare seems to have published about 100 stories, of which about eighty-five have been collected. At least forty of these have supernatural content". Many of De la Mare's ghost stories can be found in the collections Eight Tales, The Riddle and Other Stories, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, On the Edge and The Wind Blows Over. His complete short stories have now been published in three volumes issued by Giles de la Mare Publishers, London. De la Mare also wrote two supernatural novels, Henry Brocken (1904) and The Return (1910) and for children, The Three Mulla Mulgars (1910, AKA The Three Royal Monkeys), described by critic Brian Stableford as a "classic animal fantasy". Boucher and McComas, however, dismissed his 1949 Collected Tales, saying "we freely admit we find Mr. de la Mare's self-consciously subtle wordiness unreadable."

Recognition
His 1921 novel, Memoirs of a Midget, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Yeats included his poetry in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936).

In popular culture
De la Mare's play Crossings has an important role in Robertson Davies' novel The Manticore. In 1944, when the protagonist David Staunton is sixteen, de la Mare's play is produced by the pupils of his sister's school in Toronto, Canada. Staunton falls deeply in love with the girl playing the main role - a first love which would have a profound effect on the rest of his life.

Poetry

 * Songs of Childhood (1902) New ediition, Longmans,1916,
 * Poems. Murray, 1906.
 * The Listeners and Other Poems. Constable, 1912.
 * A Child's Day. Constable, 1912.
 * Peacock Pie (1913)
 * The Sunken Garden. Beaumont, 1917.
 * Motley. Constable, 1917.
 * The Marionettes (1918)
 * Flora. Heinemann, 1919.
 * The Veil. Constable, 1921.
 * Collected Poems 1901-1918. Constable, 1920. [Volume 1] [Volume 2]
 * Down-a-Down-Derry. A Book of Fairy Poems. London: Constable, 1922.
 * O Lovely England (1952)
 * Walter de la Mare, The Complete Poems (edited by Giles de la Mare). (1969)

Novels

 * Henry Brocken (1904)
 * The Three Mulla Mulgars (illustrated by Dorothy Pullis Lathrop). New York:A.A. Knopf, 1919.
 * also published as The Three Royal Monkeys (children's novel)
 * The Return (1910; revised edition 1922; second revised edition 1945)
 * Memoirs of a Midget. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1922.

Short stories

 * The Riddle and Other Stories (1923)
 * Ding Dong Bell (1924)
 * Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925) (children's stories)
 * The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926)
 * On the Edge (1930)
 * The Lord Fish (1930) (children's stories)
 * The Walter de la Mare Omnibus (1933)
 * The Wind Blows Over (1936)
 * The Nap and Other Stories (1936)
 * Stories, Essays and Poems (1938)
 * The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942)
 * Collected Stories for Children (1947)
 * A Beginning and Other Stories (1955)
 * Eight Tales (1971)
 * Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895-1926 (edited by Giles de la Mare). (1996)
 * Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1927-1956 (edited by Giles de la Mare). (2000)
 * Walter de la Mare, Short Stories for Children (edited by Giles de la Mare). (2006)

Plays

 * Crossings: A Fairy Play (1921)

Nonfiction

 * Some Women Novelists of the 'Seventies (1929)
 * Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930)

Edited

 * Come Hither (1923; new and revised edition, 1928; third edition, reset and printed from new plates, 1957)
 * Early one Morning, in the Spring. Chapters on children and on childhood as it is revealed in particular in early memories and in early writings. (1935)
 * Behold, This Dreamer! Of reverie, night, sleep, dream, love-dreams, nightmare, death, the unconscious, the imagination, divination, the artist, and kindred subjects. (1939)
 * Love (1943)