+ Spec 125:571 O 30 ’20 500w
“Few of our poets have availed themselves of their privilege of prosodic freedom more delicately than Mr de la Mare. He has a musician’s ear; his rhythms have the clear articulation and unpredictable life-lines of the phrases in a musical theme. The course of his verse reminds us frequently of the fall of a feather launched upon still air and fluttering earthwards, tremulously in dips and eddies.”
+ The Times [London] Lit Sup p657 O 14 ’20 3300w
DE LA MARE, WALTER JOHN. Rupert Brooke and the intellectual imagination. pa 75c Harcourt
20–1238
“It is the brilliant quality of Rupert Brooke’s passionate interest in life, his restless, exploring, examining intellect, that chiefly concerns Walter de la Mare in a lecture on Brooke first given before Rugby school a year ago, and now issued in booklet form. He suggests that poets are of two kinds: those who are similar to children in dreamy self-communion and absorption; and those who are similar to boys in their curious, restless, analytical interest in the world. Poets of the boyish or matter-of-fact imagination are intellectual, he says: they enjoy experience for itself. Poets of the childish or matter-of-fancy heart are visionary, mystical; they feed on dreams and enjoy experience as a symbol. He thinks that Brooke’s imagination was distinctly of the boyish kind.”—Bookm
Booklist 17:60 N ’20
“Those many who admire the peculiar mysticism and subtlety of Mr de la Mare’s reaction to the terms of experience will not be surprised that this essay of his seems the most valuable comment that has been made on the poet of the ‘flaming brains,’ the most romantic and appealing figure of youth and song that has crossed the horizon of these riddled years.” Christopher Morley
+ Bookm 51:234 Ap ’20 650w