De la Mare was born at 83, Maryon Road, Charlton, then in the county of Kent but now part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. He was partly descended from a family of French Huguenot silk merchants through his father, James Edward de la Mare (1811–1877), a principal at the Bank of England; his mother was James's second wife, Lucy Sophia (1838–1920), daughter of a Scottish naval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning.[5] (The suggestion that Lucy was related to the poet Robert Browning has been found to be incorrect.) He had two brothers, Francis Arthur Edward and James Herbert, and four sisters, Florence Mary, Constance Eliza, Ethel (who died in infancy) and Ada Mary. De la Mare preferred to be known as "Jack" to his family and friends, as he disliked the name Walter.
De la Mare was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School, then worked from 1890 to 1908 in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil. He left the company after Sir Henry Newbolt arranged for him to receive a Civil List pension so that he could concentrate on writing.
In 1892 de la Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met and fell in love with (Constance) Elfrida Ingpen, the leading lady, who was ten years older than him. Her father, William Alfred Ingpen, was Clerk to the Insolvent Debtors Court and Clerk of the Rules.[5] De la Mare and Elfrida were married on 4 August 1899, and they went on to have four children: Richard Herbert Ingpen, Colin, Florence and Lucy Elfrida. The family lived in Beckenham and Anerley from 1899 till 1924.[6] The home in Anerley in South London was the scene of many parties, notable for imaginative games of charades.[7]
From 1925 to 1939, de la Mare lived at Hill House, Taplow.[8]
On 7 September 1929, his daughter, Janette de la Mare[9] married Donald John Ringwood in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England.[10]
In 1940 Elfrida de la Mare was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She spent the rest of her life as an invalid and died in 1943.
De la Mare suffered from a coronary thrombosis in 1947 and died of another in 1956. He spent his final year mostly bedridden, being cared for by a nurse whom he loved but never had a physical relationship with.[11] His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.
Come Hither is an anthology edited by de la Mare, mostly of poems, but with some prose. It has a frame story and can be read on several levels. It was first published in 1923 and was a success; further editions have followed. It includes a selection of poems by the leading Georgian poets (from de la Mare's perspective).
De la Mare was, notably, a writer of ghost stories. His collections Eight Tales, The Riddle and Other Stories, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, On the Edge and The Wind Blows Over each contain several ghost stories.
De la Mare's supernatural horror writings were favourites of H. P. Lovecraft, who in his comprehensive study Supernatural Horror in Literature said that "[de la Mare] is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve".[12] Lovecraft singled out for praise de la Mare's short stories "Seaton's Aunt", "The Tree", "Out of the Deep", "Mr Kempe", "A Recluse" and "All Hallows", along with his novel The Return.
Gary William Crawford has described de la Mare's supernatural fiction for adults as being "among the finest to appear in the first half of this century", whilst noting the disparity between the high quality and low quantity of de la Mare's mature horror stories.[13] Other notable de la Mare ghost/horror stories are "A:B:O", "Crewe", "The Green Room" and "Winter".
A number of later writers of supernatural fiction, including Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell,[13]David A. McIntee and Reggie Oliver, have cited de la Mare's ghost stories as inspirational. The horror scholar S. T. Joshi has said that de la Mare's supernatural fiction "should always have an audience that will shudder apprehensively at its horror and be moved to somber reflection by its pensive philosophy".[14]
For children de la Mare wrote the fairy taleThe Three Mulla Mulgars (1910, later retitled The Three Royal Monkeys), praised by the literary historian Julia Briggs as a "neglected masterpiece"[15] and by the critic Brian Stableford as a "classic animal fantasy".[16]Richard Adams described it as his favourite novel.[17]
Joan Aiken cited some of de la Mare's short stories, such as "The Almond Tree" and "Sambo and the Snow Mountains", for their sometimes unexplained quality, which she also employed in her own work.[18][clarification needed]
De la Mare described two distinct "types" of imagination – although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. It was at the border between the two that Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.
De la Mare opined that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. He explained in the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination"[19][a] that children "are not bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. [...] They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." His biographer Doris Ross McCrosson summarises this passage, "Children are, in short, visionaries." This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality (or, in a limited sense, both).
The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which "retires like a shocked snail into its shell". From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes, the "intellectual, analytical type".
By adulthood (de la Mare proposed), the childlike imagination has either retreated forever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of the spectrum of adult minds: logical and deductiveorintuitive and inductive. For de la Mare, "[t]he one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty." Yet another way he puts it is that the visionary's source of poetry is within, while the intellectual's sources are without – external – in "action, knowledge of things, and experience" (McCrosson's phrasing). De la Mare hastens to add that this does not make the intellectual's poetry any less good, but it is clear where his own preference lies.[a]
The Riddle and Other Stories (1923): "The Almond Tree", "The Count's Courtship", "The Looking-Glass", "Miss Duveen", "Selina's Parable", "Seaton's Aunt", "The Bird of Travel", "The Bowl", "The Three Friends", "Lispet", "Lispet and Vaine", "The Tree", "Out of the Deep", "The Creatures", "The Riddle", "The Vats"
Ding Dong Bell (1924): "Lichen", "Benighted", "Strangers and Pilgrims", "Winter"
Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925): "Pigtails, Ltd.", "The Dutch Cheese", "Miss Jemima", "The Thief", "Broomsticks", "Lucy", "A Nose", "The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire", "The Lovely Myfanwy", "Maria-Fly", "Visitors"
The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926): "Mr Kempe", "Missing", "The Connoisseur". "Disillusioned", "The Nap", "Pretty Poll", "All Hallows", "The Wharf", "The Lost Track"
On the Edge (1930): "A Recluse", "Willows", "Crewe", "At First Sight", "The Green Room", "The Orgy", "An Idyll", "The Picnic", "An Ideal Craftsman"
The Dutch Cheese (1931) (editions illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop [1931] and Irene Hawkins [1947]) (children's stories)
The Lord Fish (1933), illustrated by Rex Whistler (children's stories)
The Walter de la Mare Omnibus (1933)
The Wind Blows Over (1936): "What Dreams May Come", "Cape Race", "Physic", "The Talisman", "In the Forest", "A Froward Child", "Miss Miller", "The House", "A Revenant", "A Nest of Singing-Birds", "The Trumpet"
A Beginning and Other Stories (1955): "Odd Shop", "Music", "The Stranger", "Neighbours", "The Princess", "The Guardian", "The Face", "The Cartouche", "The Picture", "The Quincunx", "An Anniversary", "Bad Company", "A Beginning"
Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895–1926 (1996): Collection comprising the contents of The Riddle and Other Stories, Ding Dong Bell and The Connoisseur and Other Stories, as well as "Kismet", "The Hangman Luck", "A Mote", "The Village of Old Age", "The Moon's Miracle", "The Giant", "De Mortuis", "The Rejection of the Rector", "The Match-Maker", "The Budget", "The Pear-Tree", "Leap Year", "Promise at Dusk", "Two Days in Town"
Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1927–1956 (2000): Collection comprising the contents of On the Edge, The Wind Blows Over and A Beginning and Other Stories, as well as "The Lynx", "A Sort of Interview", "The Miller's Tale", "A:B:O.", "The Orgy: An Idyll, Part II", "Late", "Pig", "Dr Iggatt"
Walter de la Mare, Short Stories for Children (2006)
Early One Morning, in the Spring: Chapters on Children and on Childhood As It Is Revealed in Particular in Early Memories and in Early Writings (1935)
Behold, This Dreamer!: Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects (1939)
De la Mare's play Crossings has an important role in Robertson Davies's novel The Manticore. In 1944, when the protagonist David Staunton is sixteen, de la Mare's play is produced by the pupils of his sister's school in Toronto. Staunton falls deeply in love with the girl playing the main role, a first love that has a profound effect on the rest of his life.[33]
Benjamin Britten set several of de la Mare's verses to music: de la Mare's version of the traditional song "Levy-Dew" in 1934, and five others, which were then collected in Tit for Tat.[34]
Theodore Chanler used texts from de la Mare's story "'Benighted'" for his song cycle 8 Epitaphs.[35]
^ abIn the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination" de la Mare uses the term "imagination" for both the intellectual and the visionary. To simplify and clarify his language de la Mare generally used the more conventional "reason" and "imagination" when discussing the same idea elsewhere.
^ abTheresa Whistler, "Mare, Walter John de la (1873–1956)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2006. Retrieved 2 April 2013.
^"Stealing Cakes". Getty Images. 7 September 1929. Retrieved 20 July 2023. Julian de la Mare and Jane Baddeley (daughter of Angela Baddeley) fight for the last of the cakes at the wedding of Janette de la Mare and Donald John Ringwood in Taplow. Janette is the daughter of poet and author Walter de la Mare.
^ abGary William Crawford, "On the Edge: the Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare" in Darrell Schweitzer, ed., Discovering Classic Horror Fiction I, Wildside Press, 1992, pp. 53–56. ISBN1-58715-002-6.
^Julia Briggs, "Transitions", in Peter Hunt, ed., Children's literature: An Illustrated History, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 181. ISBN0-19-212320-3.
^"De la Mare, Walter" in Brian Stableford,
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2005, pp. 104–05.
Adrian, Jack, "De la Mare, Walter", in David Pringle (ed), St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. London: St. James Press, 1998. ISBN1558622063
Blackmore, Leigh (2017). S. T. Joshi (ed.). "In Pursuit of the Transcendent: The Weird Verse of Walter de la Mare". Spectral Realms (6).
Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 96–97.
McCrosson, Doris Ross (1966). Walter de la Mare. Twayne.
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