Printers' pie
JENNY STRATFORD
The Complete Poems of Walter de la Mare edited by Richard and, Giles de la Mare (Faber 100s) Walter de la Mare's first published book of poems, Songs of Childhood, appeared in 1902 when he was twenty-nine, his last, 0 Lovely England, three years before his death in 1953. Between them there had been at least least twenty-five separate volumes of collections of his poetry—a total which would be greatly swelled by adding in all the numerous ,private printings and variant edi- tions, as well as by counting the prose works, short stories and novels, with their admixture of verse. The new Complete Poems assembles for the first time all de la Mare's published poetry. It adds a section of unpublished poems as well as a chunk of uncollected work. In all there are nearly a thousand poems, and they represent as nearly as pos- sible the entire output of a recently dead poet.
Most people owe to Walter de la Mare some of their earliest experiences of poetry: the handful of lyrics included in the stand- ard anthologies ('Tartary', 'Nod', 'Nicholas Nye', 'The Listeners' among them). But as W. H. Auden complained in the introduction to his excellent short paperback selection (1963), the anthologists have treated de la Mare very shabbily. Little that he wrote after 1920 has usually been included. Ad- mittedly his highly individual voice was established in those early volumes: the Englishness and quietness, the metrical fluency. Many of the poems are steeped in the sense of another, often sinister, world lying behind the visible one. And it is not entirely surprising that Peacock Pie (1913) should have made his reputation with the general public. It contains some of his most enigmatic and powerful verse, written with children specifically in mind:
'Who said, "Peacock Pie"?' a I I
Nevertheless, throughout his career de la Mare enlarged the range of his work as in- to give only two examples of outstanding, and very different, poems—`The Railway Junction' (published 1933) and 'Sheep' (pub- lished 1945).
The appearance of this large volume makes it easy for the first time to see de la Mare's range. The most obvious change over the years is the move away from the elabor- ate poetic diction of his Georgian (even occasionally pre-Raphaelite?) roots, al- though de la Mare retained, to quote Auden again, a preference for 'the "beautiful" end of the verbal spectrum.' But it would be a great mistake to think of him as someone who always performed in the same poetic key. His long discursive poem, Winged Chariot (1951), may not be a work which readers will readily return to, but its para- phernalia of quotation and elaborate meta- physical imagery brings it to the fringes of the 'ambiguity' movement. Sir Edward Marsh's Georgian anthology (1912) is the natural place to find some of de la Mare's work of that early date. The short 'By Order', included among the last uncollected poems, and printed in New Poems 1956, edited by S. Spender, E. Jennings and D. Abse, looks equally of its time.
However, many of de la Mare's poems can't be dated by their year of publication. The chronology of his work is often inex- tricably entangled. He frequently covered his tracks in reworking early drafts for sub- sequent publication—something he has in common with Thomas Hardy. A draft, now in the British Museum, for example, shows that 'A Snowdrop', first published in the 1950 volume, Inward Companion, was largely written before 1938.
Most of this sort of information had to be outside the scope of Complete Poems, but the introduction makes it clear that curious burrowers among his- manuscripts will find a great deal to interest them. The editois' job, even so, was enormously com- plicated. They had to deal not only with a mass of poems, but with a poet who con- stantly revised and republished material already printed. The history of some of the poems in Songs of Childhood is perhaps the most complicated of all. Neither the original manuscript, now in private hands in the us nor the (different) typescript, nor the proofs with extra corrections by Andrew Lang, Longman's reader, needed to be considered. Nevertheless there were five editions in ques- tion. The new edition of 1916 was modified (in response to criticisms of Sir Edward Marsh), but later ones moved back to the 1902 text of many poems, although the choice of poems, by the last separate edition of 1942, was that of 1916.
Complete Poems conflates everything printed in all the editions, but here, and throughout the volumes, gives the latest text revised by the poet in his lifetime. This means that a reader who wants to see what actually appeared in one of de la Mare's books must refer to the original. To avoid repeating the poems reprinted in later col- lections usually only the first appearance is given, albeit in the—strictly anachron- istic—later version, if there has been any revision. A poem entitled 'Goodbye' is to be found in its place among a sequence from the short story 'A Green Room' from On the Edge, 1930, but in the version in which it reappeared, for the first time with a title, in 0 Lovely England, 1953. It is ex- cluded from the later collection. The reader may be assured, however, that the meticu- lous editing, and the exemplary indices and notes, spare him the need for a wet towel
in dealing with all this. _ Complete Poems will be indispensable to de la Mare's admirers. The price—for pages—looks modest enough when the m ordinary second-hand copy of a single boo of his poems costs at least 35s. Incidental a few fascinating snippets of biograph emerge from the footnotes. They lead hopes that a full-dress biography will so appear. One of the most interesting thin about de la Mare is that his career extend through so long and varied a stretch English literary history. There could well an unexpectedly wide readership. A rece Saturday quiz in the Financial Times asked 'What poet began his career in Esso?' Answer, 'Walter de la Mare a
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