Walter De La Mare
Except in the personal sense—and the charm of his gracious personality would surely surround him with friends, whether he wanted them or not—Walter de la Mare is, like Hardy, a lonely figure in modern English poetry—no other poet of our time has a place more notably apart from his contemporaries. You might almost read an allegory of this aloofness into his “Myself”:
“There is a garden grey
With mists of autumntide;
Under the giant boughs,
Stretched green on every side,
“Along the lonely paths,
A little child like me,
With face, with hands like mine,
Plays ever silently....
“And I am there alone:
Forlornly, silently,
Plays in the evening garden
Myself with me.”
only that one knows he is happy enough and not forlorn in his aloneness. You may trace, perhaps, here and there in his verse elusive influences of Coleridge, Herrick, Poe, the songs of Shakespeare, or, now and then, in a certain brave and good use of colloquial language, of T. E. Brown, but such influences are so slight and so naturalized into his own distinctive manner that it is impossible to link him up with the past and say he is descended from any predecessor, as Tennyson was from Keats. More than with any earlier poetry, his verse has affinities with the prose of Charles Lamb—of the Lamb who wrote the tender, wistful “Dream-Children” and the elvishly grotesque, serious-humorous “New Year’s Eve”—who was sensitively wise about witches and night-fears, and could tell daintily or playfully of the little people, fairy or mortal. But the association is intangible; he is more unlike Lamb than he is like him. And when you compare him with poets of his day there is none that resembles him; he is alone in his garden. He has had imitators, but they have failed to imitate him, and left him to his solitude.
It is true, as Spencer has it, that
“sheep herd together, eagles fly alone,”
and he has this in common with the lord of the air, that he has never allied himself with any groups or literary cliques; yet his work is so authentic and so modern, so free of the idiosyncracies of any period, that our self-centered, self-conscious school of “new” poets, habitually intolerant of all who move outside their circle, are constrained to keep a door wide open for him and are glad to have him sitting down with them in their anthologies.
But he did not enter into his own promptly, or without fighting for it. He was born in 1873; and had known nearly twenty years of
“that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood”