'Stepping Out of the Gloaming' : A Reconsideration of the
Poetry of Walter de la Mare
Richard Hawking
Introduction
This study has two main objectives. The initial aim is consider why Walter
de la Mare has been viewed, and continues to be viewed, as a minor poet, and
to understand why critics have largely ignored his poetry for the majority of
the last forty years. The second aim is redress some of the accusations and
assumptions that have contributed towards his present academic neglect and propose
a cogent argument to suggest that his poetry deserves to receive greater critical
attention than it has done in recent years. In order to bring this study up
to the present date, the conclusion will consider the present critical attitude
to the poetry of de la Mare.
In addressing the main
aims of this study, two inter-related points regarding his poetry will thus
emerge. The first, which will be considered in greater depth in Chapter Two,
is that he had the misfortune to be writing at a time of huge development in
English Poetry, and English Literature in general. The rise of Modernism at
the time of the First World War had the effect of creating 'new bearings in
English poetry', bearings which influential critics such as Leavis subsequently
believed were desperately required. In the wake of the eagerness to map a new
poetic course de la Mare has often been misread, with this misreading occurring
as a result of arguable generalisations being made regarding his poetry. The
study will investigate why these generalisations arose (and persist) by considering
its relationship with other poetry and movements of the period. De la Mare chose
not to follow the route chartered by Leavis, Eliot and the New Critics and has
suffered in academic circles ever since. As we will see below, the seeds of
his critical neglect were sewn and eagerly watered here.
The second point to
emerge is that the positive qualities of his poetry have been obscured following
his relegation to the status of minor poet. To a certain extent, the Modernist
movement has had the effect of casting a shadow over other notable achievements
of the time. Because of this, Chapter Three will seek an illumination by reconsidering
a selection of de la Mare's poetry. It will undermine the suggestion that the
vast majority of his poetry escapes reality by creating a dream world, and will
argue that the accusations that are most frequently levelled at his poetry by
critics are, to a certain extent, unjustified. In order to do this, the discussion
will offer the view that critics overstate the dichotomy between his work and
that of the Modernists, which will be supported by reassessing his romanticism
and looking at the influence of symbolism in his work. It will be suggested
that de la Mare, together with 'modern' poets such as Yeats and Eliot, was influenced
by the French Symbolist Movement of the nineteenth century. This influence,
which results from his "fascination with the unconscious"[1] and irrational
mind, will be exemplified by considering his employment of symbols (particually
those associated with dreams) in order to highlight the allusive and suggestive
nature of his poetry.
Finally, by discussing
the ironic nature that some of his work exhibits, it shall be argued that de
la Mare's use of a romanticism is often a qualified one in which different views
are juxtaposed but none necessarily made concrete. This will further support
the proposal that, along with Modernists poets, de la Mare did indeed face up
to the complexities of (a) reality by displaying self-reflexive qualities. Largely
due to a lack of significant development in his poetry (a poem written in 1906
could easily be mistaken for one written forty years later),[2] this study will
not propose that de la Mare is either an archetypal Modernist poet or a major
poet. However, it will be maintained that it is wrong to for him to be held
in opposition to the Modernists and dismissed as merely a poet of escape.
Setting a Context
: Georgians and Modernism
To discuss de la Mare's poetry adequately, we must first consider the period
in which he was writing. It is important that a picture is sketched of the major
developments of the period in order to construct a context in which to view
his poetry. This will help to unravel and define further the main argument of
this study and offer reasons as to why his work is largely ignored today. Although
this discussion will focus primarily upon the literary context, it shall inevitably
touch upon the historical and cultural factors that underlie and drive such
developments. Let us start, then, by considering some of these.
Walter de la Mare was
born in 1873 and died in 1956. His first collection of poems that was aimed,
primarily, at an adult audience was published in 1906 (Poems), whilst his final
collection was not published until 1953 (O Lovely England and Other Poems),
at the age of 80. Consequently, de la Mare's poetic was formed (and, to a large
extent, set in stone) during a time of extensive ideological and cultural change.
During the Edwardian period, middle and upper class society, like the Victorians
before them, were preoccupied with the quest for stability and order, viewing
themselves as rational beings in a rational universe. However, this Edwardian
'craving for fixities' faced a number of challenges: challenges that were only
in their infancy in the mid to late Victorian period.[3] Along with Darwinian
theories suggesting that English Protestant middle class economic hegemony had
not been ordained by God, the rising working classes were threatening to fulfil
their Marxist destiny by removing both the middle and upper classes from this
position of hegemony. In addition to this, Freudian theory proposed that the
pursuit of fixity was a problem of the mind and not simply of the universe.
This feared fragmentation
of both society and mind appeared, to many contemporaries, to have materialised
during the First World War. The inexorable onward march of progress, the march
of civilised rational man, had floundered on the battlefields of the Somme and
Passchendaele. They felt that some irrepairable fissure had taken place between
(what now appeared to be) the pre-war certainties of the Edwardian period and
a post-war world evidently bereft of familiar reference points. Many contemporaries
considered that the "future is dark and violent and the past is a green and
pleasant land: the turning point [was] the Great War."[4] Consequently, it seemed
that a new set of ideals was required to confront this different - modern -
world. Amongst those having to formulate these new ideals were, of course, poets.
Accordingly, we must
attend to the ways in which the poets who were writing at a time of such apparent
vast and irrerversable change responded to the events that were unfolding around
them. Unfortunately, this will lead to an over-simplification of the poetry
that was being written in the period, with approximations and generalisations
inevitably made. Nevertheless, it is useful that we regard the major "groups,
movements and tendencies" [5] in the poetry of the early twentieth century because
it will help us to explore some of the reasons why de la Mare is frequently
passed over by critics today.
In doing so, we are
able to highlight two movements in which poetry of different 'tendencies' is
seen to belong too. On the one hand were the Georgians who, it is argued, retreated
from the Modern to the pastoral and to an idealised vision of England, whilst
drawing strongly from the Romantic tradition that runs from Wordsworth and the
Romantics through the poetry of Tennyson and Swinburne. On the other, poets
such as Eliot retreated further back from any literary tradition that underwrote
contemporary poetry towards Classicism - to the source - in order to reconstitute
their poetic. The focus in this chapter will be on these two movements because
"the main drama between 1918 and 1928 in the history of English poetry was the
clash between Modernist and Traditional modes". [6] Moreover, because de la
Mare is frequently regarded (and dismissed) as a Georgian poet, of lacking Modernist
characteristics, it is crucial that we look at some of the achievements, accusations
and assumptions that are made towards the movements that his poetry is associated
- and disassociated - with. This will enable us to address two misconceptions
that have frequently been made in academic circles regarding the Georgian movement
itself, and also their relationship with the Modernist movement.
It can be argued that
prior to the rise of either of these multifarious poetic ideals, the nature
of poetry was a cautious one:
In general, the conservatism that prevailed in the first decade of the twentieth century resulted in patriotic and nationalistic issues often being addressed in the poetry of the period. Consequently, this poetry frequently possessed a morally didactic nature, in which an individual's personal response was largely excluded.[8] The Georgians were born from this poetical climate. (The majority of poets that are often viewed as being part of this family acquired their status as 'Georgian' with the inclusion of their poetry into Edward Marsh's Georgian Poetry anthologies, which ran to five volumes from 1912 to 1922.) Although no set guidelines were ever laid out as to what Georgian poetry should or should not seek to achieve (unlike Pounds Imagism, for example), there was a general reaction amongst them against the didactic nature of the major Victorian poets. Moreover, they also shared a mutual dislike of the nationalistic and patriotic verse of Edwardian's such as Kipling, Newbolt and Chesterton. In both cases, the Georgian poets disliked and sought avoid the excesses in diction and rhetoric of such verse, and the subsequent relegation of the individual that occurred within it.[9]"The excesses of the Aesthetic movement of the 1890s, and the absence of any poets of the stature
of the great Victorians, had led to a poetical climate characterised by both political and artistic
conservatism". [7]



The second distinction to be made is perhaps a more disregarded and fundamental one. This is that the term 'Georgian' is a loose one for it does not represent an easily definable mode or type of poetry. Indeed, to a certain extent poets that are frequently viewed as being synonymous with the Georgian movement are poetically diverse. In fact, Bloom goes as far as to propose that Georgianism should not be seen as a movement at all. Instead, he believes that it "describes another current in the modern movement sometimes parallel to and sometimes intermixed with Imagism, Vorticism and Futurism",[18] all of which represent movements closely linked with the Modernism. Hence, it would be naïve to propose that those associated with the rise of the Modernist movement disliked all poetry that was included in the Georgian anthologies. Equally, it would be naive to suggest that all contributors to Marsh's volumes disliked poetry in the vein of Newbolt.











Sketching a general literary context as we have done provides us with a platform form which to view the poetry of Walter de la Mare. However, this chapter is not seeking to place his work in this context because this is not achievable without so many qualifications as to make it a pointless exercise. Furthermore, with the aims of this study in mind, doing this would not be desirable, for it as a result of being placed that has contributed towards pigeonholing and thus his position of relative obscurity. In contrast, the contextual platform will simply enable us to explore his poetry in relation to the movements that are outlined above.

"For many years past Walter de la Mare has occupied a curious position in the story of Twentieth Century English poetry. […] The tributes paid to his artistry over a period of fifty years by such diverse writers as Ford Madox Brown, Pound, Middleton Murry and W.H. Auden are a proof that he was admired by 'modern' poets and critics. Yet from the 1930s onwards he was ignored, or uneasily dismissed, by most of the influential younger men who formed the public taste in poetry".[1]
This was written in 1970. It was is one of only six articles (no books) exclusively
concerned with de la Mare's poetry that has been written since 1969. His poetry
has occupied, and to a large extent still occupies, a 'curious position'. However,
it is possible to shed some light on this conundrum with the consideration of
his relation to the Georgian and the Modernists movements. To do this, we must
begin by assessing the 'stuff' of his poetry by considering the general themes
that run through it. Only then will we be able to adequately explore his work
in the context of others.
As briefly mentioned
in Chapter One, critics have closely associated the poetry of Walter de la Mare
with the Georgian movement because his work exhibits many of the qualities that
the early Georgians are seen to possess. For example, his poetry represented
a definite reaction against the didacticism of Victorian and Edwardian verse
(although it is open to debate as to whether it was a conscious one), with much
greater emphasis placed upon personal response and, importantly, the imagination.
For de la Mare, there was a desire (or a need) to place the individual at the
centre of his art. This, in addition to the significance that the natural world
held for him in this reassertion, clearly points to the influences that lay
behind it:
They haunt me - her
lutes and her forests;
No beauty on earth I see
But shadowed with that
dream recalls
Her loveliness to me
('Arabia')[3]
These influences derive from the writings of the Romantic Poets a hundred years before and are central to the vast majority of his poetry. Perkins notes that de la Mare shared the Romantic's belief
"that nature may be a veil over some further reality, which perhaps, the imagination intuits; [and so] he returned for support to the Romantics protest on behalf of imaginative insight and wholeness as opposed to scientific reason".[4]
That this returning proved to be fundamental to de la Mare is wholly understandable if you accept that his "dominant impulse was the quest for another, richer self and another, essential reality":[5]
For de la Mare, inextricably linked with the idea that Nature and Imagination could provide a means of achieving access to 'this vanished kingdom' (one that is not bound by the actualities of the physical world), was the vision that only childhood affords. Children, in his Romantic tinged eyes, embody innocence and simplicity, for they are "linked with the moral and beneficent properties of nature".[7] To him, they represent the true essence of the Self. Because he believed that childhood was the perfect state, there is a yearning for it throughout his poetry. He felt that once childhood was left behind, we were also leaving behind the ability to access another reality. Effectively, we become exiles:'In the peace of our hearts we learn beyond the shadow of doubting
That our dream of this vanished kingdom lies sleeping within us'
('The Spectacle')[6]





Amongst the aforementioned romantic poets, Coleridge was particularly influential in de la Mare's quest for (re) discovering this other, or rather this lost, 'paradisal scene'. This is because Coleridge shared his high regard for the visionary power that children possess, and the importance of it in adult life (in which 'knowledge' is of no help): "To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood […] this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent".[9]





Consequently, it is reasonable to propose that de la Mare's evocation of nature is one that is dominated with an attempt to re-create an impression that was formed in childhood. For this reason, his observations are not as naturalistic as, for instance, the observations of poets such as Hardy or Hudson. This lack of descriptive detail in such evocations is simply because de la Mare is not concerned with the object per se, but rather with the initial impression that it makes on the individual. In this, his regarding of nature is more closely allied to that of Keats, for it is a perception that is imbued with a sense of yearning.[12]







Because de la Mare regarded Nature to part of his 'self' - and his 'self' part of Nature - so the impressions that the natural world made was on him was crucial for a deeper understanding. And because he felt the most powerful vision was a childlike one, he believed that the initial impressions of Nature were the purest and least unaffected, and so the ones of most value.[16] In the above poem, the 'stream', which can be seen to represent the unconscious, enables de la Mare to convey the initial impression it had on the child and the importance of this impression on the adult. In order to discover truths akin to those that are found in childhood, there is an intermingling of nature and imagination in the reflection. Consequently, both of these intertwined factors contribute greatly to the fostering of his vision because both offer the hope of transcendence from one reality to another. In this, de la Mare was once again writing in the vein of the great romantics by "engaging with the great questions raised by the self and the world";[17] who am I? ; How did I come to be as I am? ; What am I here for? : What becomes of me when I die? He shares with them the constant searching for ultimate truths concerning our existence.







Here, de la Mare draws a distinction between what he believes to be two separate kinds of imagination, when he states that "the one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty".[20] Essentially, the distinction he draws is between the visionary imagination and the intellectual imagination. Whereas the visionary imagination is intuitive, inductive and childlike, the intellectual imagination is logical, deductive [21] and a product of mature experience. Once again, de la Mare is influenced by Coleridge because, essentially, he marks out the same difference (although Coleridge's is defined more in the terms of imagination and reason).[22] Still, whichever way the imaginative cake is cut, it is safe to say that in his poetry de la Mare preferred the taste of intuitive and inductive imagination over a hard piece of logical and deductive reason.







Of all the Romantics, his regard for the way in which language should be employed was closest to Blake. Both felt that language had an esoteric quality. For them, "words could evoke, resonate, rouse memories (personal and super-personal); they could initiate men directly to truth far too high for discursive logic even to reach, far less grasp."[25] If deeper truths of the kind de la Mare searched for throughout his poetry were ever going to be discovered, then it was clear to him that every method that may be of use would have to be utilised. This is why diction, and particular words, was so important in his style of composition. It is a style that is produced from the considered crafting of versification, with painstaking attention paid to all aspects of it.[26] The desired overall effect of this was the creation of a certain mood. His use of "pace, pause, slight metrical variation and echoing or partially echoing vowels and consonants" enables him to sustain a poems mood. Unsurprisingly, it is a mood frequently associated with childhood:







This explains why critics write of the resemblance that his poetry has to music, and clearly, it is not an accidental one. De la Mare was fully aware of the way in which music, like the sense of smell, has an indescribable power to evoke and rouse a lost, perhaps forgotten, reality.



"De la Mare made something unique out of Georgian simplicity of glance, gentleness of pressure, and quietness of voice. The world he fixed in his gaze at once veiled and half-disclosed a realm beyond sense and time. In de la Mare's poetry the meaning and the reality of things lie off-centre, off-stage".[29]
In many respects, then, the differences between de la Mare and the Georgians
lie in the angle of his gaze: dealing with "states of perception out of the
normal"[30] effectively separates him from them. Although he employs certain
techniques of expression in common with the Georgians, de la Mare is doing so
for different ends. He stands alone from the majority of the Georgians essentially
because his vision would not allow him to simply observe the natural world and
inextricably link his self with it: he was more aware of the inherent difficulties
in doing this. Consequently, as we shall see below, de la Mare's use of romanticism
was not an unquestioned one. Arguably, therefore, de la Mare was seeking deeper
and more ambiguous aspects of the self than the Georgian poets in general, whilst
being more aware of the problems involved in achieving them.
Hence, viewing de la
Mare work in the context of the Georgians only becomes clearer with the knowledge
that the term Georgian is a loaded one. For critics, it represents a tool to
dismiss the poet. The dictum "if it is good it cannot be Georgian; if it is
Georgian, it must, ipso facto, be feeble"[31] is one that has led to poets being
lumped in with the Georgians in order to dismiss them, or separated from them
so as to be regarded more highly. This is often why critics play down links
that 'serious' poets such as Lawrence, Owen and Gurney have with the Georgian
movement, whilst poets who do not fit with the poetical ideal are rejected for
being Georgian. As Rogers suggests "those who do not like the Georgians would
doubtless maintain that Mr de la Mare was not ever one of them".[32] Likewise,
those who do not like the poetry of de la Mare would doubtless maintain that
he was. Rogers encasptulates the difficulty succinctly when he states that "it
was possible to be a de la Mare and a Georgian poet",[33] which is why his relationship
with Georgism can be viewed to be an ambiguous one.
Arguably, more important
is the relation of his poetry to that of the Modernists. Consider Humle's Romanticism
and Classicism, an essay that greatly influenced the main participants, especially
Pound. It "calls for a new poetry, 'cheerful, dry and sophisticated', a poetry
to be distinguished by 'accurate, precise and definite descriptions and having
nothing to do with 'infinity, mystery or with the emotions'".[34] For certain
protagonists of the 'Modern movement', de la Mare's poetry did not sit approvingly
into this context, especially the aspects Hulme felt that poetry should be avoiding.
To them, de la Mare was embracing all three at a time when he should have been
turning his back to them. Furthermore, because his style remained a largely
conservative one,[35] his perceived inadequacy was compounded with the failure
to offer any new challenges to form.
As Press suggested at
the beginning of this chapter, the result was that de la Mare was not marked
off as a modern poet by the influential critics of the time. Consequently, although
he remained popular with the wider reading public, to serious critics of poetry
he gradually began to be regarded as a poet who failed to confront not the incongruities
of modern life. To exemplify the general attitude that serious critics had towards
de la Mare's poetry further, consider one of the few essays that did concern
itself with his work:
"His poetry, then, is by admission a poetry of withdrawal, cultivating a special poetical 'reality' :his world of dreams, nourished on memories of childhood, is for him the intrinsically poetical […] He has formed habits that make impossible such a frank recognition of the human plight as he seems to offer".[36]
This passage is an extract from Leavis' 1932 evaluation of the then present
climate of English poetry, New Bearings in English Poetry. Although in
other sections of the essay he reconginises some of the qualities of de la Mare's
poetry (thus does not dismiss it entirely) it is nevertheless clear that poetry
such as his falls short of what he perceives to be required from a modern poet.
As well as failing to meet the criteria set out by Hulme, it was seen to be
void of the ambiguity and irony that serious and modern poetry should display.
Consequently, Leavis believed that what was needed was "the invention of new
techniques [because] the established habits form a kind of atmosphere from which
it is supremely difficult to escape".[37] Thus for Leavis, de la Mare has a
fatal flaw: he lacks a modern sensibility in that he does not face up to society
and its fragmenting actualities squarely and purposely in the eye. Consequently,
his poetry is viewed as inadequate because it is unable to disinherit, or at
least challenge, the 'established habits' of the tradition in which it is written
in. Because the poets associated with the Modernist movements had attempted
to take up the challenge in order to escape from the confines of tradition,
the major implication for de la Mare was that he gradually began to be viewed
as a romantic escapist. He was criticised for writing in a tradition that was
no longer seen as usable for the depiction or interpretation of the Modern.
To the minds of the intellectual school of poetry, this meant that he could
not - or would not - face up to the complexities and demands of contemporary
life. Consequently, although admired by the people who 'formed the public taste
in poetry', his poetry was inevitably regarded by them as being minor. As we
have seen, this status was compounded with his affiliation with the (neo) Georgians.
It is reasonable to
suggest, then, that de la Mare could not escape the dramatic impact the Modernism
had on English poetry. At a time when freer versification and a more fragmented
form came to prominence in order to accommodate a changing world, de la Mare's
use of language, form and subject matter synonymous with a unusable and immature
romantic tradition sounded his critical death-knell. As a result, de la Mare
was "dismissed for lacking the capacity for ironical contemplation, for preserving
an inflexible poetical tone, and generally being incapable of handling mature
experience."[38] Accordingly, critics began to pay less and less attention to
a poet such as de la Mare who is seemingly unaffected - in both his subject
matter and his poetic form - by the modern, especially as he was writing at
a time of huge historical, cultural and literary development.
In addition to this,
he had the misfortune "that his poetic career coincided with the growth of a
critical orthodoxy […] that came to dominate the study of poetry in schools
and universities."[39] Thus his poetry was disfavoured in academic circles because
it did not exhibit the qualities that modern poetry should exhibit. De la Mare's
poetry was seen to lack hard objectivity, and would thus not reward a functionalist
study of it. Furthermore, his poetry continues to be disfavoured in academic
circles because it does not exhibit the qualities that poetry of that time should
exhibit.
In other words, not
being regarded as part of the Modern movement has meant that his poetry has
been viewed as escapist whimsy (which is an assessment not unlike the accusations
made at the Georgians as a whole) or simply overlooked. Hence, from the viewpoint
we have at the end of the twentieth century, de la Mare is seen much like he
was at the time of Leavis' New Bearings. His poetry is viewed as belonging to
an outdated tradition, displaying archaic diction and form at a time when the
Modernists were rejecting them to create new poetical ideals. This, albeit rather
crudely, explains why a poem such as Eliot's The Wasteland, which attempts to
reflect the modern experience, has received as much (if not more) critical attention
than all of de la Mare's poetry added together.
Simply an Escape
or a 'Modern' Inheritance? : A Reconsideration of De La Mare's Romanticism.
The discussion has thus far argued that de la Mare's poetry has an ambiguous
relationship with the Georgian movement. But more importantly for this study,
the discussion has proposed that his work is largely seen by critics not to
have adopted the central tenants of the Modernists doctrine. Consequently, it
is reasonable to suggest that de la Mare's escape from certain aspects of life,
and his Romantic expression of this supposed escape, are the major reasons for
the decline in critical attention in his poetry. However, this chapter will
argue that a re-evaluation is needed of de la Mare. Although the accusations
that he was the last of the Romantics and an escapist have truth in them, it
is often overlooked to the extent in which de la Mare was a self-conscious Romantic,
who did not accept its conventions without qualifications. Moreover, in some
respects, his poetry can be seen to exhibit traits more readily associated with
Modernist movement; namely symbolism, irony and an awareness of the limitations
of language. As a result, it shall be argued that it is too simplistic to dismiss
de la Mare as a romantic escapist writing at a time when serious poets were
trying to come to terms with the modern.
In general, the poetry
of de la Mare does not concern itself with external things. This does not mean,
however, that his poetry offers an escape from the actuality of life. As Whistler
states, "poetry was for him the road to reality, not aside from it".[1] He may
be turning away from external actualities and the effect they have on him, but
in doing so he is arguably grappling with more fundamental issues about the
human condition. For example, the creation of a dream-world in his poetry is,
unlike Tennyson's or the Pre-Raphaelites', not an escape or withdrawal (from
everything), but rather a important communing between the conscious and unconscious
self.[2] In other words, he uses, or rather regards, his imagination as a key
to a reality that co-exists with the external one:
I weep within; my thoughts
are mute
With anguish for poor
suffering dust;
Sweet wails the wild
bird, groans the brute;
Yet softly to a honied
lute
Crieth a voice that
heed I must;
Beckons the hand I trust.
('Enigmas')[3]
For de la Mare, this other reality is equally - if not more - valid than the
reality we can see and touch, and so has little choice but to listen to the
voice that crieth within if full possession of the self is to be attained. Because
of this, it is a misconception to think that he was consciously trying to escape
from modern experience at all: it was simply that chose to explore deeper, more
abstract questions in his poetry. Rather than turning his back on life, de la
Mare "sought truth behind the façade which some call life; his purpose is not
to lull but to awaken us."[4]Unfortunately, in the rare essays that have written
by serious critics, they have largely failed to either recognise or accept this
view.
Accordingly, he is frequently
charged with escapism because critics have not allowed de la Mare his "special
subject matter and his special perspective on experience."[5] To compound this,
a quality that critics often overlooked in their critiques of de la Mare's poetry
is the influence that the nineteenth century French Symbolist Movement had on
his work. De la Mare concurred with the fundamental belief of the movement's
main protagonists that deeper truths and a different, better reality existed,
which could be found not through the senses in the actual, but in the imagination
(or the unconscious). Therefore, de la Mare was in agreement with Mallame that
the Self as a subject for poetry was a perfectly valid, indeed crucial, one.[6]
Not surprisingly, then, de la Mare's quest for a deeper Self (or a 'inner life')
leads him to search throughout his poetry for a 'spirit' - the 'Impossible She'
- that is akin to the French symbolists Ideal of the Beautiful. The Ideal of
the Beautiful for Baudelaire "gave force a purpose to his tortured and disordered
soul; for Verlaine it justified the search for forbidden pleasure; for Mallarme
it was all that mattered".[7]De la Mare shared their sentiments in that the
Impossible She ('For she who is gone')[8] was also all that mattered and his
constant yearning for it also gave him purpose because she represented the "self
for which all men search":[9]
Whose servant art thou?
Who gave thee earth, sky and sea
For uttermost kingdom
and ranging? Who bade thee to be
Bodiless, lovely; snare,
and delight of the soul,
Fantasy's beacon, of
thought the uttermost goal?
('The Strange Spirit')[10]
Consequently, in line with the Symbolists poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine and
Mallarmé (and to lesser extent the Aestheticism of Rossetti and Pater), de la
Mare sought a poetry of indirection and creation of mood through the oblique
presentation of symbols.[11] This approach had to be taken because, in his (and
their) view, "there is much in the human consciouness for which plain statement
is not inadaquete but impossible. We all know fleeting, indefinite states of
mind which have no clear outline of character and can hardly be expressed at
all".[12] An example of this can be seen in 'Good-Bye':
The last of last words
spoken is, Good-bye -
The last dismantled
flower in the weed-grown hedge,
The last thin rumour
of a feeble bell far ringing,
The last blind rat to
spurn the mildewed rye.[13]
Here, the juxtaposition of fragmentary symbolic images represents the above
'fleeting, indefinite states of mind'. As a result, there is an absence of a
determined narrative and no concrete meaning or structure is offered. Instead,
it simply attempts to excite a state of mind or an emotion based on the generative
power of the title word 'Good-Bye'.[14] Accordingly, the poem remains highly
ambiguous throughout:
Love of its muted music
breathes no sigh,
Thought in her ivory
tower gropes in her spinning,
Toss on in vain the
whispering trees of Eden,
Last of all words spoken
is, Good-bye.
Thus, rather than using words to signify a concrete, tangible object, de la
Mare uses them as symbols ('Eden', 'Ivory Tower') in hope of evoking, through
association, "a reality beyond the senses":[15] his desire is to evoke an emotion
in the reader, not offer a structured message.
However, the problem
for de la Mare arose from a distinction that was made by modern poets and critics
between acceptable and unacceptable symbolism in which certain symbols were
deemed more suitable for use than others. For example, he was criticised for
displaying a symbolism that was weak and impure because it was more subjective
than poets such as (later) Yeats or Eliot displayed. Indeed, Yeats criticised
the Romantics for a use of symbols that are singular to their own particular
personalities: their poetry lacked - in Eliot's terms - 'objective correlatives'.[16]
In this criticism, Christ believes that Yeats (and Eliot) is voicing the Modernists
view that a "private and personal symbolism"[17] should be avoided at all costs
by employing 'archetypal' symbols. Again, the implication here is that de la
Mare's use of symbolism was either overlooked, ignored or dismissed because
it did not meet the objective criteria of more modern poets; it was just another
aspect of his poetry that did not satisfy their poetic guidelines. So, even
if de la Mare's symbolism was properly acknowledged, it would arguably have
been swiftly dismissed because it is too personal and lacks objective correlatives.
Not valuing this aspect of his poetry, or simply not recognising it, has contributed
greatly to his perception as a poet of withdrawal or escape. Indeed, it has
resulted in a damaging misconception of what de la Mare was prospecting in his
work.
We can thus see that
in his quest for glimpses of a different reality, de la Mare was unable to be
open and conscious: instead he had to be more allusive and indirect in his poetry,
in which "objects tended to suggested rather than named."[18] Consequently,
the symbols that were thrown up by the unconscious, especially in dreams, held
the utmost significance for him because they can be viewed as evidence that
a reality different from our waking one exists:[19]
When music sounds, all
that I was I am
Ere to this haunt of
brooding dust I came;
While from Time's woods
break into distant song
The swift-winged hours,
as I hasten along.
('Music')[20]
Once again, we can see that this trancesdent realm, which is 'stilled with ecstasies',
is inextricably linked with nature and childhood, all of which are co-existing
within the unconscious mind. Here, sleep (the 'swift-winged hours') returns
de la Mare, for a time, to his childhood Self ('all that I was I am'). Therefore,
dreams represent a product of the unconscious because they are not subject to
the repression that the adult, reasoning mind may employ. They are created through
the free-play of our sleeping selves, without any conscious control of our own,
which means that, for a short time, the shackles of mature experience are released.
Consequently, the importance that dreams had for de la Mare's bears a close
resemblance to the speculations of Freud and Jung for they resolved
De la Mare concurred with this view that if a deeper understanding of the self is to be achieved, then dreams are highly meaningful because they offer symbolic glimpses of the primary experience. In this respect, dreams can be closely allied not only to Coleridge's conception of the primary imagination, but also to the childlike, intuitive and inductive visionary imagination that de la Mare proposes. Hence, experiences such as dreams, which are removed from the processes of a conscious intellect, accordingly occupied a crucial role in his quest for an 'essential reality'. In any questioning of human existence, they offer crucial truths if a comprehensive and meaningful answer to be attained. By supporting the pyschoanalytic premise that "man's actions could be motivated by forces of which he knew nothing",[22] dreams provided evidence of an inherent irrationality existing in human behaviour: an irrationality that deeply fascinated de la Mare."in finding highly meaningful the 'natural' symbolism that occurs in dreams. Both asserted that the sensitive analysis of dreams is our essential entrée to individuality in its completeness and depth. For both, these truths were revelatory of the inner psyche".[21]










De la Mare asked similar questions of the Self and its existence in the world that the Romantics had asked before him, but he remained unsure whether he would ever recover the answer, or even whether there was an answer to them. This is not to say that he did not look for answers throughout his poetry, but rather that he was conscious that they might not ever be found. It was representative of 'a lifelong tangle of perplexities'[25] for de la Mare in which there was a frightening sense of knowing nothing except one thing: the mortality of the self.[26]











Although de la Mare begins the stanza in a characteristically Romantic manner, it soon crumbles into a more Modernistic style. He brings together two diverse poetic forms because he fully realises that it will effect a greater impact and make concrete the speaker's utter desolation. It is a desolation compounded with the line 'the abode of the nightingale is bare', which can be read as a reference to either the soul of the individual poet; or to the ideals held by the Romantic poets generally.[32] Most likely in de la Mare's case, it is both. Whichever way it is interpreted, the implication is of self-awareness to the limitations of romanticism and its ideals.















De la Mare is writing in a tradition that is widely recognised for its varied attempts to reconcile the self with deeper truths in the hope that the self would be more fully known. If de la Mare then expresses doubts that such a hope is ever achievable ('We are but vain shadows/And reflections be') it suggests that his use of the Romantic tradition is an ironic one. He is fully alive to his predecessors enigmatic claims of the their visions or their hoped-for encounters with the sublime, but cannot help having doubts irrespective of his own desire for them. Further evidence of this can be found in Shadow, where the romantic echoes of Plato's 'myth of the cave' hollowly reverberate:







It is an ambivalence that reflects the fact that "the authentic romantic ironist is as filled with enthusiasm as with scepticism."[40] Admittedly, however, de la Mare's employment of Romantic irony is rarely explicit. To a significant extent it has to be read into the poem by the reader with the knowledge that de la Mare was not necessarily a passive inheritor of the Romantic tradition. In doing this, of course, there is the ever-present danger that a poem is interpreted as being ironic, when its intention was not to be. There is a thin divide between the two, and it is not always possible to notice it. Nevertheless, it remains valid to suggest that de la Mare does adopt an ironic tone in his work, which manifests itself in the understatement, indirection and ambiguity that pervades the vast majority of his poetry.[41] Rather than believing that the truth is waiting somewhere in the ether to be discovered by a highly perceptive poet (or in de la Mare's case, recovered), he is continually afraid that it might not be. As a consequence, any definite truths are replaced by a prevailing uncertainty:





Thus if nothing can be known undeniably, then "a quiet unemphatic, faintly humorous, reflective awareness of open possibilities is the only appropriate stance"[43] for de la Mare to take. He questioned everything, without expecting to receive an answer:[44]





The result of such a stance is that he suggests many impressions in his poetry, without necessarily vowing to any of them: de la Mare, like "modernism itself, cannot reach any conclusions."[46] Hence, irony, like symbolism, enables de la Mare both a "means for unifying the apparent contradictions of experience [and] to assert the world's diversity"[47]: they offer him flexibility of expression.




Consequently, he foreshadows Post-structuralism's concern with language by displaying an anxiety "about the impossibility of the relationship between the world and the word, […] the knowing and the articulation:"[50]





His awareness of the divide between the signifier and the signified further supports the contention that the majority of his poetry was suggestive rather than explicit: for de la Mare, "words only hint at things, not expresses them".[52] It also provides further evidence to support the hypothesis that, along with 'modern' poets, de la Mare was conscious of the limitations that he was subject to. Thus, although such linguistic self-awareness was less explicit in his early poetry, later poems such as Words came to more overtly exhibit the (modernistic) sentiment that Eliot's displays in his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

We can thus conclude that for those poets and critics who forecast and shaped the poetical climate during the early part of this century, de la Mare's romanticism left him out in the cold as a poet of escape. For them, poetry which "does not express revolt against, or ironical acceptance [of all aspects of life], is an attempt to escape from, instead of recognising and facing up to 'reality'."[54] However, the above revision has proposed that by not looking beyond - or unpicking - de la Mare's romanticism, they have failed to appreciate that de la Mare was attempting to face up to reality: it was simply that the reality he chose to confront was a different one to theirs. This should not - does not - make him a poet of escape. As Jarrell notes, "it is easy to complain that de la Mare writes about unreality; but how can anybody write about unreality."[55]



Conclusion and Epilogue
This study has discussed some of the major reasons that have contributed towards de la Mare's present status as a minor poet and his subsequent critical neglect. It has demonstrated that the acendency of Modernism and the New Critics of the intellectual school, with their championing of a dry, self-reflexive and critical poetry, resulted in de la Mare getting left behind. In their eyes, he was stuck-fast in an unsuitable -unusable - non-modern tradition, writing poetry that was not worthy of serious academic consideration. By lumping his poetry in with all that was Georgian and regarding him as a poet of escapist whimsy has meant that the new direction poetry took in the 1920's obscured de la Mare's own individual poetic achievements. As a consequence, it has suffered from being wrongly pigeonholed as being a certain type of poetry because it has detracted from qualities more readily associated with the Modern movement.

"I had, in those remote days, what could too easily become a limited theory. There was so much I wanted poetry to be doing for mankind that I could forget how incomparably much more it might be doing. So I fell, I think, already into the commonest trap for critics - one I was naturally fond of pointing out to others. I undervalued some poetries - not for being poor themselves - but for not being other sorts of poetry I then thought mattered more."[2]
The implication of Richard's statement is an obvious one; de la Mare's poetry
should be considered for what it is and not dismissed for what it fails to be:
it is worthwhile in its own right, regardless of other poetries that 'mattered
more'. More pertinent to this particular discussion is the fact that the closer
attention Richards is calling for enables the reader to uncover aspects (symbolism,
irony) that de la Mare's poetry does share with other poetry of the time. Thus,
as this study has sought to do in Chapter Three, we must take a fresh look at
de la Mare's poetry, and not in the light of previous, overarching definitions
or categorisations. Only then will a proper appreciation of all of its qualities
be attained.
Hopefully, this may
be about to finally happen. In 1997, "inspired by a surge of interest in Walter
de la Mare's work after a conference organised by King's College, London […]
critics and aficionados formed a society to honour the memory of Walter de la
Mare, […] and to bring his work to a wider audience."[3] In addition to this,
the society aims to promote the study and deepen the appreciation of his works
by encouraging and facilitating both research and new de la Mare publications.
Since the formation of the society, there have been lectures by both critics
and artists (Hoban, Bonnerot, Harvey and Adams, to name a few) on the work of
Walter de la Mare. One of these, (Walter de la Mare: Life and Times, October
1998, at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature) was attended by some 300 people,
of which over eighty percent were working academics.[4] Giles de la Mare exemplified
this groundswell in interest in a meeting with him in March 1999, for he believes
that after years in the critical wilderness, academics and are beginning to
reappraise the individualistic contribution Walter de la Mare has made to English
Literature. He feels that only now is de la Mare's work emerging from the long
and prejudicial shadow that was cast by Modernism and the New Critics. [5]
Moreover, Dr Ann Bentinck
supplies evidence that De la Mare "shall no longer remain an elusive figure
to criticism"[6] with the publication of the first book dedicated exclusively
to his work for over forty years. Provisionally entitled Dominant Imagery in
the Work of Walter de la Mare and published in the year 2000, it proposes that
de la Mare
In recognising that there is a serious need for a new critical study of his work, Bendinck believes that the "book will help to fill the enormous gap on University library shelves".[8] Together with future lectures, the formulation of a research database (by Giles de la Mare) and the construction of the first Walter de la Mare website (by myself), Bentink's book will reinforce the society's primary aim that calls for a fuller and deeper appreciation of his work. It is hoped that my own study is, if only in a small way, a positive contribution towards achieving this goal."was an artist with a unique vision, a man of strange delights and sorrows, [The book will] reveal de la Mare's more complex and serious side. […] It will study de la Mare's personality and his ideas, his linguistic technique, the Georgian scene and the influence of the Symbolist Movement on his work."[7]