Thirty-two years after Walter de la Mare’s death, his stories, his poems, and his many miscellaneous works hold little if any sway in the educated mind, with the exceptions perhaps of an idiosyncratic anthology of dream- and sleep-related literature called Behold the Dreamer!, which retains a bibelot-type allegiance among a small circle, and the much more widely known single poem “The Listeners,” with its revenant or (literally) haunting imagery, its echoes of chivalric duty and romance, and its overall open-ended meaning, the dubious fruit of the Neo-Platonism de la Mare shares with Shelley, among other English poets.
Yet when there appeared in the frenetic hurly-burly of our fall publishing season this reissue of a long-forgotten, miscellaneous work from this author—an eccentrically organized essay about tales of adventure, “the romantic,” solitude, and desert islands, in both fact and fiction—it made a surprisingly diverting impression.
Seventy-two pages of an essay, followed by two hundred twenty-four pages of notes—a bizarre arrangement to say the least, and one which presents even the most obliging of readers with a conundrum. Does he look up each note as it appears, thereby so long delaying his return to the text as to lose the sense, tone, and pace of it? Or does he ignore the superscripts, plough through the seventy-two pages, and then, taking a firmer grip on his hat, plunge on through the notes, trusting to a sufficient recall of the master text to (roughly) fit in the highlighted personage, work,
