Biography Essay

Walter de la Mare will be remembered chiefly as a poet and writer of children's verse, the two genres not always clearly distinguishable in his work. But until 1928 he was also a novelist and until the mid-1930s a short-story writer; he was an anthologist of great individuality, an essayist, and a reviewer. He began his literary career with a volume for children, Songs of Childhood (1902), and followed it in 1904 with a novel, Henry Bracken. Not until 1906 did he produced Poems, his first collection for adults. Two more novels were to appear— The Three Mulla-Mulgars (retitled The Three Royal Monkeys in its 1935 reprint) and The Return in 1910—before the publication of his second volume of poems, The Listeners and Other Poems (1912), and his second book of poems for children, Peacock Pie (1913), brought him to the attention of the critics and a wider public. His...