Walter de la Mare: Essayist

As well as writing poetry, short stories and novels, Walter de la Mare was an outstanding literary critic. In addition to the critical studies listed below (of which Pleasure and Speculations (1940) and Private View (1953) are arguably the most significant), de la Mare also served as main critic on the Times Literary Supplement for about a dozen years from 1910: he contributed 214 reviews and articles. He also contributed a large number of reviews for the Westminster Gazzette.


M.E. Coleridge: An Appreciation, London, The Guardian, 1907

Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination: A Lecture, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1919

Some Thoughts on Reading (lecture), Bembridge, Yellowsands Press, 1923

Some Women Novelists of the 'Seventies, Cambridge University Press, 1929

The Eighteen-Eighties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, Macmillan, 1930

The Printing of Poetry (lecture), Cambridge University Press, 1931

The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins, Cambridge University Press, 1932

Lewis Carroll, London, Faber, 1932

Poetry in Prose (lecture), H. Milford, 1935, Oxford University Press, 1937

Arthur Thompson: A Memoir, privately printed, 1938

An Introduction to Everyman, London, Dent, 1938

Stories, Essays and Poems, edited by M.M. Bozman, London, Dent, 1938

Pleasures and Speculations, London, Faber, 1940; Books for Libraries Press, 1969

Private View (with an introduction by Lord David Cecil), London, Faber, 1953; Hyperion, 1979