Search Results

“... Is there anybody there?’ the Traveller asks in ‘The Listeners’, Walter de la Mare’s poem from 1912. It’s a question that at first seems to go unanswered, for the mysterious silent inhabitants sequestered behind the moonlit door on which he raps refuse to reveal themselves or to respond to him out loud ...”

“... this was Forrest Reid, a novelist and critic in his late forties, admired by Yeats, Forster and Walter de la Mare, but almost ignored in his own city at that time. His family had belonged to the merchant class, who were relatively free of the political stubbornness which was extreme among the industrialists and their ...”

“... on with his son and was sometimes ruthless with his friends – ‘people soon bore him’ said Walter de la Mare sadly – although most of them were called on to help him in his struggle with depression. But Edward Thomas was, and is, greatly loved. His scholarly biographer, George Thomas, irritated as he is by ...”

“... Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ to the poem originally called ‘The Sentimental Exile’. Walter de la Mare, however, had a less rebellious personality. His biographer says rightly that he was associated with the Georgians but not concerned as they were with the delights of country weekends or ‘bedded violets ...”

“... frisked a pampered mouse’ – a curdled Georgian sentence that leads one straight into one of Walter de la Mare’s most plain and chilling tales about a boy’s initiation into horror. The story is ‘An Ideal Craftsman’. In this genre he was a master – albeit a very literary master – of the riddles of ...”

“... one – probably not even the author – knows in what relation they stand to a possible fact. If Walter de la Mare had known a disquieting and dominating old lady, and written about her, he would not also have been able to write the masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his ...”

“... Nevertheless, The Spell is as straightforwardly readable – and haunting – as the stories of Walter De La Mare, say, or as Emily Brontë. Secondly, it is a reflection on the largest public event in Broch’s life – the takeover of Germany and Austria by the Nazis, heralding their attempt to conquer the ...”

“... of people whose hearts are touched in precisely the same way’; and she quotes a little chunk of Walter de la Mare to reinforce her point. Lyris combines literacy, stoicism and personal austerity with charity and humour, and spreads inter-racial and inter-class tolerance. Her best friend is a school dinner lady ...”

“... long and distinguished line led back, through such expert modern practitioners as L.P. Hartley and Walter de la Mare, to the definitive achievements of M.R. James, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and their Gothic predecessors. The ghost story, or original tale of the supernatural, was essentially a short story, delicately ...”

“... and explicatory methods necessary to do battle with those who valued Tennyson and Swinburne and Walter de la Mare. He was amusing and frequently defamatory about his antagonists. ‘Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard, gentlemen. The master of Jesus. He goes in for Morris dancing, you know. I’ve seen him with ...”

“... edition of Thomas’s Collected Poems (reprinted here as an appendix), his neat-minded friend Walter de la Mare drew attention to Thomas’s ‘loose-woven’ style, a wonderful epithet which simultaneously conjures up the Thomas of tweeds, pipes and trousers tucked in socks, and his verse, written in a form both ...”

“... but the question should be shelved for the moment. How near or far from the real thing is Sir Walter Scott, whose art intuits everything implied in the new genre and the new expectations, and who in Waverley specifically places the art world of Scottish picturesque history in opposition to the real bourgeois world of progressive England? In having things ...”

“... Charles are the best. I find Andrew too much like Little Nell, and Simon too much like Walter Mitty: but these flaws will not harm Jeffrey Archer’s sales. Simon Raven is playing in a different league from the D.M. Thomas Academicals and the Archer All-Stars. He is more ambitious: he has his eye on posterity. Galsworthy and Snow have left their ...”

“... between 1912 and 1922 Edward Marsh stubbornly published best-selling poetry collections, featuring Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Blunt, nervously commemorating a threatened pastoral. Other writers, more diffident or isolated, threw in their lot with entropy: Charlotte Mew’s ...”

“... is so delicately slanted that it recalls not Tennyson, nor its ostensible subject Walter de la Mare, but Saint Emily of Amherst: Walter de la Mare died 1956 the year of the hungarian uprising so he won’t read my old-fashioned ...”