chapter 3
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader
About six months before Eliot published ‘Tradition and the Individual
Talent’, Walter de la Mare wrote a series of newspaper articles on the
business of reading. Intended as a general meditation on the subject from
the author’s point of view, it came to a conclusion about the author’s
part in the reading process that, at first glance, would trouble no one –
except, perhaps, Eliot: ‘A book is a mirror reflecting its author – his
thoughts, desires, dreams, illusions, disillusionments. It may be as “im-
personal” as was the primeval block of granite from which was hewn the
Sphinx, but its very impersonality is an indication of his being and
character.’^1
On a second glance, however, de la Mare’s point about impersonality
becomes rather more opaque, and rather closer to Eliot’s. ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’ declares that ‘honest and sensitive criticism is
directed at the work, rather than its author’, and a generation of critics
took this to mean that biographical criticism was irrelevant. But coming
from the opposite direction, de la Mare had anticipated them, for if a
book is a perfect mirror of its author, then any impersonality reflects the
impersonality of the author’s being and character too, an ambiguity which
collapses the most biographical reading possible into the least. By identi-
fying the author so completely with the work, de la Mare was not
recommending author-centred reading: rather, his aim was to make
biography entirely pointless, because learning about the author tells us
nothing at all we did not already know from the book:
A poem is so direct an entry into the secret mind of its writer that there is usually
little reason or justification for any desire to explore the precincts. If further
knowledge of his history and personality is necessary to a true understanding, it
means that he has left us the task of finishing the unfinished. That perhaps is why
the beautiful work of the anonymous is so happily complete and so completely
happy. It is as quiet and self-contained as a solitary green-crowned islet in the
deep.^2
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