WALTER DE LA MARE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18653, 23 August 1930, Page 14

WALTER DE LA MARE

A DETAILED CRITICISM. Mr Walter de la Mare's writing, both poetry and prose, is set apart by its unusual and exquisite quality. He is at once too profound and too simple for the casual reader, yet even the uninitiated are beguiled once they have glanced through his magic casements. Mr Forrest Reid gives a critical study in his book of Mr de la Mare’s work. In this book his life is scarcely touched on. being as Mr Reid remarks, private, and a concern that the author alone has the right to gratify. So the curious must content themselves with the bare facts that Mr de la Mare has both Scottish and French blood in him. that his father died when he was four and that at 16 he left school to enter the office of the Anglo-American Company. Here he remained until he was 35 when his work began to find its way into print.

Mr de la Mare's first stories were published by Cornhill magazine, signed by the author's pseudonym, Walter Ramal. Even in his earliest and not quite successful prose Mr de la Mare showed his quality. The reader was conscious of something entirely fresh, strange, rather whimsical and distinctly exciting. He was above all things literary, liking the sound of obsolete words. Nearly all his writing is imaginative. Both poetry and prose is washed by the moonlit loveliness of some dream world.

Mr Reid gives a detailed criticism of all Mr de la Mare's published work. His book will prove valuable to all lovers and students of this poet and novelist. His interperation is interesting. He finds Mr de la Mare’s object always to be the same, to weave the dream fabric so real to himself into the solid substance of actuality. He finds in him an occasional spiritual affinity with Blake, Emily Bronte, Poe and Traherne. Pie dwells at length on the supernatural beauty of much of the best of the writer’s work, but without it Mr Reid claims there could not be the moral and spiritual beauty which springs as much from the heart as from the imagination, and which is Mr de la Mare's most endearing and precious gift. “Walter de la Mare,” by Forrest Reid (Faber and Faber).