Yet if the first part of this paragraph sounds like New Criticismavant la
lettre, the second half has a characteristically de la Marean twist, for it
makes the absence of the author’s personality less a point of interpretative
dogma than a kind of experience to be explored by the reader, so that the
anonymous poem’s isolation and self-containment become part of its
mysterious emotional character. If a poem is the mirror of its author,
then reading an anonymous poem is also an experience of the ‘being and
character’ of anonymity, not a biographical fact simply missing from the
work but an active person or presence. This fascination with theexperience
of absence and vacancy is central to de la Mare’s outlook, with its abiding
interest in ghosts, graves and silences. ‘Is there anybody there?’ runs de la
Mare’s most famous question in ‘The Listeners’, and it is answered,
precisely, by silence which ‘surged softly backwards’; there is no reply,
yet that absence is present, prescient and unsettling. In order for his
audience to experience the uncanniness of this encounter, rather than
simply read about it, however, de la Mare needed to cultivate a certain
kind of reading, a way of dealing with words whose ideal practitioners
were for him between two and six years old. De la Mare was a children’s
poet, the role in which he is mostly read today, because he believed
children heard poetry in a way that left them open to the uncanny, and
that it was part of the work of poetry itself to return its adult readers to the
child’s state of dependency as the price of that openness.
De la Mare was also a Georgian poet, though, a disciple of Thomas
Hardy and a friend of Edward Thomas, and his explorations of authorial
absence share Thomas’s desire for poetry that would make its author ‘step
out of self ’. And like Thomas, his pursuit of these self-erasing ideals led
him to reject a certain sort of modernist poetry, only then to propose an
alternative which sounds much more like an anticipation of Eliot’s sort.
In a 1915 review of an anthology of Japanese poetry, de la Mare wondered
whether English verse had any equivalent to the ‘brevity and concision’ of
thehaiku,its ‘little dab of colour upon a canvas one inch square’.^3 But he
does not mention the most obvious candidate for the English equivalent,
the Imagist poem; Pound had claimed the year before that ‘In a Station
of the Metro’ was composed with the model of ahaikuin mind, as the
next best thing to a language in ‘little splotches of colour’.^4 The direction
of de la Mare’s musing, however, suggests that this oversight may have
been deliberate. The triolet and limerick were the ‘nearest approach’ in
formal terms, he pondered, but what makes Japanese form really distinct-
ive is its effect on the author’s relation to the work itself: ‘Though the
presence of personality may be discovered in it by the expert, it exacts a
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 109