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 possessed this virtue
in spades. Indeed, he positively deplored the factual. In
a later essay, he wrote that he prized the wild,
error-ridden charts of medieval cartographers far more than
the exact, factually correct maps of the moderns. Of T. S.
Eliot, he could remark, late in life, “What I have against
T.S.E. is that in The Waste Land he felt it necessary to
give precise meanings and correspondences.” In the same
spirit, he rejected literary realism, both in his prose and
his poetry, not because it was coarse or sordid but because,
as he said, its close specificity left out too