The Pathway of Edgar Allan Poe Traced in the Works of Walter de la Mare

The Pathway of Edgar Allan Poe Traced in the Works of Walter de la Mare Burton R. Pollin Professor Emeritus, CUNY WALTER DE LA MARE (1873-1956), during his long and very productive life, received unparalleled honors and gained great popularity for his varied writings: poems (chiefly lyrical), novels, short stories, reviews often searching and informed, essays especially on literature and writers, anthologies highly individual in structure, much children's literature in prose and poetry, and illuminating introductions often to books of contemporaries. One of his eight hundred poems, the memorable "The Listeners," continues to have a "first place" in anthologized English works;1 and his fantasy-novel Memoirs of a Midget, still often reprinted,2 richly exploits the acute perceptions into man's conventional thoughts and behavior when confronted by gross contrasts. Humble in family background, that of middle-class Huguenot refugees , Walter John de la Mare (who alone in his family legally and early Gallicized his "Delamare" surname3) in his teens, as a filial duty, entered a thankless and dull clerical job in the statistics office of the AngloAmerican oil company (Standard Oil). He served for eighteen years until an appreciative and politically influential magazine editor, lawyer, and writer, Henry Newbolt, charmed by his early poems and strange novel, Henry Brocken, published pseudonymously, secured for him from the Asquith government a small grant of £200. This gave him the courage and near freedom to retire from his constrictive post and write prolifically , especially at first for the periodical press: 214 critical articles in the TLS and dozens more in other journals,4 including numerous short stories. Steadily he added to his earliest volumes—of poems in 1902, and three novels, 1904 and 1910. 39 ELT 42 :1 1999 The literary and academic community soon took him up as a contemporary eminence, awarding prizes (the Polignac for The Return, 1911; The James Tait Black Memorial for Memoirs of a Midget, 1921); honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Bristol, and London Universities; many honors paid by the Royal Society of Literature , such as Member (1915), Professor of English Fiction, 1915-1938 with almost annual lectures required, Vice-President (1938);5 numerous settings of poems for music and specially illustrated editions of works; and a published book of forty "tributes" on his seventy-fifth birthday from leading writers, including a laudatory poem by T. S. Eliot.6 Beside his lifetime government pension, of 1915, he received the "Companion of Honour" distinction in 1948 and then the Order of Merit (1953). Twice the government offered him a knighthood (1924,1931), refused both times. Walter de la Mare was most renowned for his poems, lately and aptly termed "fluent, highly inventive, technically skilful, and unaffected by fashion."7 His resistance to new trends in poetic styles and to the broadening and diversifying of themes as in works by Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and Edith Sitwell, for example, in the first two decades of the century , certainly explains the marked decline in his reputation and popularity later. His friendship with several members of the "Georgian Poetry" school, especially Rupert Brooke, whom he supported strongly in a lecture and writings,8 led to de la Mare's being denounced as "escapist" and superficially romantic. Even in 1921, his two-volume Collected Poems was attacked by Harriet Monroe's Poetry as "good old-fashioned poems " which "rhyme well" and are composed of "hauntingly sweet music," "lovely at first sight but soon false," "pleasing jingles" with a "studied naivete " and "abstract sentiments."9 In the following decades, much adverse criticism continued, although usually patient and respectful, but even his old bailiwick of the TLS censured his long poem on time, Winged Chariot, for "a shameless fondness for poeticisms," his "traditionalism " and "the fatal weakness of his [literary] position" (24 August 1951, p. 527). The decline in reputation matches that in the number of reprints of his nearly one hundred publications in verse and prose.10 We find the latest anthologies of English writings of the modern period sometimes ignoring him entirely and even omitting "The Listeners," the start of his enormous authority and popularity in 1912."11 What then is the reason for tracing "the pathway" of...