By 1932, when Leavis's
New Bearings in English Poetry was published, a canonical list of "truly modern" poets had been drawn up. Only the poet who had avoided or, as in the unique case of Yeats, had at great cost overcome in himself the debilitating effect of late Victorian romanticism could be considered for inclusion; at the head of the list were Eliot and Pound and the recently discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins. Because their work did not answer to the received definition of modern poetry, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and Edwin Muir, poets of strong individuality and substantial achievement, had to wait until the second half of the twentieth century to be noticed in academic circles. De la Mare is still waiting.
He 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 Brocken .
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