Walter de la Mare

Biography

Walter John de la Mare was born in April of 1873 in Kent to accountant James Edward Delamare and Lucy Sophia Browning, daughter of radical naval medicine reformist Dr. Colin Arrott Browning. From a young age, Walter had an interest in romantic ideology, daydreaming sublime adventures for both himself and his classmates, once suffering a rebuke from his mother for exaggerating the sickness of a young classmate to the point of death. De la Mare was a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School where he began his writing career by founding the Chorister’s Journal. At the age of seventeen he left school to work for the Anglo-American Oil company, where he worked rigorous hours for eighteen years. However, despite the day job of statistics, de la Mare used this time to experiment in writing both poetry and prose. He became so passionate about his writing, that after his career with the oil company and starting a family with Constance Elfrida Ingpen, he left his job and dedicated himself completely to his writing. He doted upon his four children and was involved with many popular literary figures of the time— in both writing and publishing— who would have tea with him, brainstorm the conflicts of the cosmos, and inspire him to write.

An acquaintance of Walter de la Mare once said “a tea-talk has something of the restrictions of an art-form… the party will come to an end: the conjurer will pack away his magical properties; and you will be ‘called for’— by Time if not a punctual grown-up. And it is as a conjurer that I think of [Walter]— a Prospero who knew that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” but none the less real for that." De la Mare was inspired by literary giants like Shakespeare and Chaucer as well as great romantic writers such as Keats and Wordsworth. Like them, Walter de la Mare was intrigued by the psychology of the human condition, deep phyosophical questions of morality and fate, as well as the awe inspiring sublimity of the natural world and horror of the unknown. He was intrigued with dreams and childhood, and though he did not strictly follow any particular religious sect, he was heavily influenced by the idea of the Divine presence in the Natural world and the majority of his works reflect these themes.  Russel Brain recalled, “he thought that children have a perfection of pose and beauty, and natural grace of movement, which they subsequently lose." It seems that both in his poetry and short stories de la Mare seeks to bridge the gap in memory, and to access the essence of childhood, in an attempt to recover the “loss” of innocence and adventure that gives way to maturity and reason. Though most of his literary works were poems, particularly children’s poetry, these themes extend into his novels and short stories, particularly in one of his short stories, “The Creatures” as his characters are given access to a gorgeous garden, kept by two mysterious childlike figures. At the end of his memories of their tea-time chats, Brain said, “Saying goodbye to [Walter] always took a long time, for he would think of some unanswerable question which had to be discussed. At last he shook my hand in both of his and said: ‘Come again soon!’”