Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was never a Poet of Importance.
He made no prophecies, issued no manifestos. To the burning
questions of the age he responded, if at all, only with
dreamy silence. He was doggedly vague. If he ever
contemplated the Zeitgeist, he would probably have
personified it as “Herr Professor Zeitgeist” and included
him, like “John Mouldy,” in one of his riddling children’s
poems:
I spied John Mouldy in his cellar,
Deep down twenty steps of stone;
In the dusk he sat a-smiling,
Smiling there alone.
De la Mare was, in his vexing way, deeply frivolous. He
preferred the misty, the ill-defined, the indeterminate, to
the hard-edged fact. In a 1909 review for the
Times
Literary Supplement, he praised the Dorset-dialect poet
William Barnes for possessing “the magnanimity of refusing
to peer too closely.” But he himself posses ...
Eric Ormsby's latest book is Ghazali (Oneworld). Eric Ormsby was born in Atlanta, raised in Miami, and now lives in Montreal, where he is a professor in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. His Poetry has appeared in most of the major journals in Canada, England and the U.S., including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Paris Review, Descant, Parnassus and The Oxford American. In recent years he has been a regular contributor of essays and reviews to The New Criterion, as well as to Parnassus, Books in Canada and The Yale Review. His first collection of poems, Bavarian Shrine and other poems, appeared in 1990 and won the QSpell Award for 1991. In the following year he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for “outstanding work as a poet.” His 1992 collection entitled Coastlines was a finalist for the QSpell Award of that year. A third collection, For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems appeared in 1997 with Grove Press in New York. His work has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry as well as in The Norton Introduction to Literature. A fourth collection of poems, entitled Araby, appeared in 2001 with Signal Editions (Montreal). A collection of esays, most originally published in The New Criterion, will appear in Fall 2001. As a scholar, Ormsby specializes in medieval Islamic theology and philosophy and regularly contributes articles to academic journals in that field. He has travelled widely in the Islamic world as a researcher and a consultant. He is married, with two sons, and lives with his wife Irena, an architectural historian in Montreal.
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