Naomi Royde-Smith, ‘unknown, beloved, perennial, ubiquitous, in that
wide shady hat of his and dark dwelling eyes’.^11 De la Mare did not try
to publish anonymously, though, for his Mr Anon is not just the
missing author, the person who might potentially be identified one
day by diligent research. Rather, he stands for a particular manner of
poetic creation which is indifferent to an individual author’s originality
and personality, and wholly at odds with the tradition of Pater and the
Imagists whose claim to artistic excellence is based upon its form’s
fidelity to the author’s unique experience or emotion. Nursery rhymes
are poems that have developed over time rather than poems that have
been made by one person, and Mr Anon is the representative of the
thousands of anonymous parents and children who have created them by
wearing smooth the sounds of what were originally popular satiric songs
(‘Little Jack Horner’), charms (‘Ladybird, Ladybird’), ballads or ditties.^12
‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ and ‘Eena Meena Mina Mo’ are relics of old
counting systems. What matters to the formation of the nursery rhyme
as a poem is not any original experience or intention, but memorable
speech, the pleasurable fort-da of rhymes and rhythms suspended and
reinstated which embed themselves unawares into the child’s memory,
until they are needed for the next generation; they are poetic language
whose form and power has arisen independently of any singular origin
and meaning. De la Mare shared his fascination in these processes with
Edward Thomas, both intrigued by the way flower-names and place-
names had become a kind of anonymous ‘way-side poetry’, and their
interest is a rural version of the long Western tradition of Aeolian
poetics from classical antiquity to Surrealism.^13 What interests the
post-Romantic end of this tradition is not the irrelevance of the author
(Surrealism was never for shrinking violets) but the experience of his or
her absence; as de la Mare declared in a lecture some years before
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the magic of poetry is to find
that ‘the self counts for nothing’ compared to the everlasting symbols it
uses, of which the real person is but a ‘reflex’: ‘such magics make real;
they make unreal. They nibble at the very foundations of life... they
prove we are the sport, the shrines of ancient memories, and are bound,
too, on a long journey.’^14
It is this interest in a lack of origins and originality that sets de la Mare’s
focus on children apart from the general Edwardian shift towards writing
with a child’s-eye view, subsequently important for early modernist
writers in their search for a naive, direct and uncompromised perspec-
tive.^15 Schiller’s prime example of the unified naı ̈ve sensibility was the way
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 111