Walter de la Mare

Walter John de la Mare (1873–1956) stands as one of the chief modern exemplars of the romantic imagination in English literature. Born on April 25, 1873, in Charlton, Kent, de la Mare was a prolific poet, novelist, and short story writer, best known for his atmospheric, often haunting evocations of childhood, dreams, and the supernatural. Of French Huguenot and Scottish ancestry, his formal education extended only as far as St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School in London. This lack of a university education did not impede his intellectual development; he was a self-taught man whose literary journey began in earnest while working for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company. For eighteen years, from 1890 to 1908, he labored as a bookkeeper and statistician, dedicating his spare hours to writing.

His early work, published under the pseudonym “Walter Ramal,” included the poetry collection Songs of Childhood (1902). This book immediately established him as a significant, original voice in children’s literature, a genre in which he would excel throughout his career. His conviction that childhood was a time of unique vision, intuition, and closeness to spiritual truth would become a central, defining theme of his entire oeuvre. In 1899, he married Constance Elfrida Ingpen, and the financial demands of supporting a family further fueled his commitment to writing. The publication of his novel Henry Brocken (1904) and the poetry collection Poems (1906) brought him increasing recognition. In 1908, a crucial turning point arrived when he was awarded a Civil List pension, arranged by his friend Sir Henry Newbolt, which allowed him to leave his corporate job and devote himself entirely to literature.

The poet’s mature voice found its greatest expression in the collections The Listeners and Other Poems (1912) and Peacock Pie (1913). The former contains his most anthologized and iconic poem, “The Listeners,” a masterwork of suggestion and atmosphere that encapsulates his fascination with the moment of contact—or near-contact—between the material and transcendent worlds. The Traveller’s unanswered knock at the “moonlit door” in the poem is often cited as the quintessential de la Mare moment, an elegant, ambiguous narrative that lingers on the threshold of mystery.

His prose work is as varied and accomplished as his poetry. He wrote numerous psychological horror stories, such as “Seaton’s Aunt,” which often draw comparisons to the later fiction of Henry James for their elaborate style and ambiguous treatment of the supernatural. His novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, is arguably his most substantial work of long fiction. It is an intensely realized study of social and spiritual isolation, following the life of the minute Miss M., whose external fragility belies a profound interior life. It uses a predominantly naturalistic setting as a stage for an exploration of the deeper, often terrifying realities of the imaginative and spiritual world. De la Mare continued to publish prolifically throughout his life, including the highly praised anthology Come Hither (1923) and collections of poetry for adults and children. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1948 and received the Order of Merit in 1953. He died on June 22, 1956, and his ashes were interred in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Walter de la Mare’s poetic and narrative genius lies primarily in his sustained, visionary exploration of the romantic imagination and the borderlands of consciousness. He is fundamentally a poet of dusk and dream, whose work attempts to penetrate the “veil” of everyday reality to reveal a deeper, transcendent, and often unsettling truth.

In poetry, his style is characterized by a delicate, haunting musicality and technical brilliance. W.H. Auden praised “the delicacy of his metrical fingering and the graceful architecture of his stanzas.” De la Mare was a meticulous craftsman who trained his ear through rigorous analysis of English verse. His lyrics often employ traditional forms, archaic diction, and a dreamlike tone to create an atmosphere of profound, evocative mystery. Critics often compare him to William Blake for his visionary quality and to Thomas Hardy for his themes of mortality and melancholy. The subjects of his poems—silence, memory, forgotten places, and spectral encounters—are treated not as mere fancy, but as potent symbols of a reality beyond the reach of rational thought. The pervasive mood of yearning in his poetry stems from the difficulty of fully capturing or re-awakening the “child’s vision” in the constraints of adult language and experience.

This highly individualistic approach placed him somewhat at odds with the emerging currents of Modernism in the 20th century. Associated with the Georgian poets—a group often dismissed by Modernists for their perceived sentimentality and traditionalism—de la Mare was sometimes unfairly criticized as an “escapist” who retreated from the complexities of contemporary life. I.A. Richards, a key critic of the era, notably charged him with indulging in a “lulling rhythm, an anodyne, an opiate” that offered “phantasmagoria” but not “vision.”

However, a closer reading of his work reveals a deeper complexity. The mystery in de la Mare is not a form of simple fantasy; it is a serious, often unsettling exploration of the psychological and spiritual state. His tales for adults, particularly his ghost and supernatural stories, are rarely focused on traditional plot mechanics but instead generate an intense, ambiguous, uncanny atmosphere. Stories like “Seaton’s Aunt” are masterful studies in psychological horror, where the terror emerges not from a clear, external ghost, but from an inner, menacing state of mind, suggesting a fundamental horror that lies beneath the seemingly placid surface of the mundane world.

His greatest contribution remains his ability to speak to the “young of all ages.” His children’s work, far from being merely sentimental, is often imbued with the same profound strangeness and deep emotional truth found in his adult fiction. By treating the inner world of the child as a world of prophetic vision and genuine terror, he affirmed the significance of the imagination against the sterile rationalism of the adult world. Though his reputation has fluctuated, de la Mare remains a master of atmosphere, a consummate lyric poet, and a writer whose best work profoundly explores the eternal human concern with what lies beyond the sensible, material world.