Marbles and tops: The reputation of Walter de la Mare.

摘要

The reputation of Walter de la Mare represents a conundrum which, when probed, reveals much about the intertwined ventures of writer, publisher, and critic. From 1912 to the late 1920s, de la Mare bad a public reputation equal to W. B. Yeats'. Like Yeats, he was a romantic and a symbolist, and he managed to embody in his work the spiritual concerns and anxieties of England in the Edwardian period and the Georgian that followed. By fusing elements from both folk and literary traditions and fully developing his extraordinary lyric gift, he found a point of coincidence between his own symbolist leanings and the demands of a reading and book-buying public, creating a singular de la Marean terrain in fiction, poetry, and criticism. He appeared in all five of the Georgian Poetry anthologies and attracted unusually large audiences to his readings. Celebrated by critics like Murry, Gosse, and Priestley, he also won the devotion of Henry Newbolt, Edward Thomas, and Rupert Brooke. When Geoffrey Faber and T. S. Eliot were forging the shape of Faber & Faber in the late 1920s, they chose de la Mare as one of their key writers, using his reputation to support a bold publishing venture. However, at this same moment, he came under attack from certain critics who demanded socially relevant literature and deplored the public preference for work that seemed to them outmoded and escapist. When 1. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis effectively appropriated the evaluation of poetry as one of the functions of the academy, disenfranchising the public and condemning the poets that public celebrated, de la Mare was one of their chief targets. The pronouncements of these critics, reinforced by the development of a canon of "relevant" and innovative poets in anthologies like Michael Roberts' Faber Book of Modern Verse, hardened into a critical orthodoxy that still remains in effect, seventy years later, with regard to de la Mare. Because of the lack of widespread revaluation of de la Mare's work, an understanding of his subtle lyricism and symbolisms has been lost and the meaning of his earlier reputation effaced.