When Walter de la Mare turned eighty in 1953, The Times of London described him, in its caption to a large portrait photograph, as this “Genius in our Midst.” Forty years on, that genius has largely been forgotten—due, in no small part, to the vicissitudes of fashion. Long overdue, this is the first major biography of an important twentieth-century English poet, anthologist, and short-story writer.
De la Mare was born in the outer suburbs of London in 1873. His family, of French Huguenot descent, was middle-class and relatively impoverished. Poetry was the pole of his spiritual compass from early childhood, but as a young man he had precious little time to devote to his own literary interests. His first employment was as an accounts clerk with Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the City of London, and there he remained, earning a miserable pittance of a living that barely supported his young family, for almost twenty years.
In the 1890s, he played, in dress and demeanor, at being the Nineties aesthete, wearing a foppish cravat and top hat to work. He was already beginning to write stories, though the time available—moments snatched between assignments at work or at the fag end of the very long working day—was always too brief. A gentle, private, fastidious, hypochondriacal man of medium height, he was always passionately interested in the psychology of the murderer, and these ghoulish preoccupations found an outlet in many of his earliest attempts at prose fiction.
De la
