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'Stepping Out of the Gloaming' : A Reconsideration of the Poetry of Walter de la Mare (page 2)
Richard Hawking
Chapter One
Setting a Context
: Georgians and Modernism
To discuss de la Mare's poetry adequately, we must first consider the period
in which he was writing. It is important that a picture is sketched of the major
developments of the period in order to construct a context in which to view
his poetry. This will help to unravel and define further the main argument of
this study and offer reasons as to why his work is largely ignored today. Although
this discussion will focus primarily upon the literary context, it shall inevitably
touch upon the historical and cultural factors that underlie and drive such
developments. Let us start, then, by considering some of these.
Walter de la Mare was
born in 1873 and died in 1956. His first collection of poems that was aimed,
primarily, at an adult audience was published in 1906 (Poems), whilst his final
collection was not published until 1953 (O Lovely England and Other Poems),
at the age of 80. Consequently, de la Mare's poetic was formed (and, to a large
extent, set in stone) during a time of extensive ideological and cultural change.
During the Edwardian period, middle and upper class society, like the Victorians
before them, were preoccupied with the quest for stability and order, viewing
themselves as rational beings in a rational universe. However, this Edwardian
'craving for fixities' faced a number of challenges: challenges that were only
in their infancy in the mid to late Victorian period.[3] Along with Darwinian
theories suggesting that English Protestant middle class economic hegemony had
not been ordained by God, the rising working classes were threatening to fulfil
their Marxist destiny by removing both the middle and upper classes from this
position of hegemony. In addition to this, Freudian theory proposed that the
pursuit of fixity was a problem of the mind and not simply of the universe.
This feared fragmentation
of both society and mind appeared, to many contemporaries, to have materialised
during the First World War. The inexorable onward march of progress, the march
of civilised rational man, had floundered on the battlefields of the Somme and
Passchendaele. They felt that some irrepairable fissure had taken place between
(what now appeared to be) the pre-war certainties of the Edwardian period and
a post-war world evidently bereft of familiar reference points. Many contemporaries
considered that the "future is dark and violent and the past is a green and
pleasant land: the turning point [was] the Great War."[4] Consequently, it seemed
that a new set of ideals was required to confront this different - modern -
world. Amongst those having to formulate these new ideals were, of course, poets.
Accordingly, we must
attend to the ways in which the poets who were writing at a time of such apparent
vast and irrerversable change responded to the events that were unfolding around
them. Unfortunately, this will lead to an over-simplification of the poetry
that was being written in the period, with approximations and generalisations
inevitably made. Nevertheless, it is useful that we regard the major "groups,
movements and tendencies" [5] in the poetry of the early twentieth century because
it will help us to explore some of the reasons why de la Mare is frequently
passed over by critics today.
In doing so, we are
able to highlight two movements in which poetry of different 'tendencies' is
seen to belong too. On the one hand were the Georgians who, it is argued, retreated
from the Modern to the pastoral and to an idealised vision of England, whilst
drawing strongly from the Romantic tradition that runs from Wordsworth and the
Romantics through the poetry of Tennyson and Swinburne. On the other, poets
such as Eliot retreated further back from any literary tradition that underwrote
contemporary poetry towards Classicism - to the source - in order to reconstitute
their poetic. The focus in this chapter will be on these two movements because
"the main drama between 1918 and 1928 in the history of English poetry was the
clash between Modernist and Traditional modes". [6] Moreover, because de la
Mare is frequently regarded (and dismissed) as a Georgian poet, of lacking Modernist
characteristics, it is crucial that we look at some of the achievements, accusations
and assumptions that are made towards the movements that his poetry is associated
- and disassociated - with. This will enable us to address two misconceptions
that have frequently been made in academic circles regarding the Georgian movement
itself, and also their relationship with the Modernist movement.
It can be argued that
prior to the rise of either of these multifarious poetic ideals, the nature
of poetry was a cautious one:
"The excesses of the Aesthetic movement of the 1890s, and the absence of any poets of the stature
of the great Victorians, had led to a poetical climate characterised by both political and artistic
conservatism". [7]
In general, the conservatism that prevailed in the first decade of the twentieth
century resulted in patriotic and nationalistic issues often being addressed
in the poetry of the period. Consequently, this poetry frequently possessed
a morally didactic nature, in which an individual's personal response was largely
excluded.[8] The Georgians were born from this poetical climate. (The majority
of poets that are often viewed as being part of this family acquired their status
as 'Georgian' with the inclusion of their poetry into Edward Marsh's Georgian
Poetry anthologies, which ran to five volumes from 1912 to 1922.) Although no
set guidelines were ever laid out as to what Georgian poetry should or should
not seek to achieve (unlike Pounds Imagism, for example), there was a general
reaction amongst them against the didactic nature of the major Victorian poets.
Moreover, they also shared a mutual dislike of the nationalistic and patriotic
verse of Edwardian's such as Kipling, Newbolt and Chesterton. In both cases,
the Georgian poets disliked and sought avoid the excesses in diction and rhetoric
of such verse, and the subsequent relegation of the individual that occurred
within it.[9]
Consequently, the Georgians
shared the desire for reintroducing the individual and depicting a personal
response in their poetry.[10] To do this, they commonly evoked the rural landscape
rather than looking towards the city for inspiration because their beliefs were
firmly entrenched in the traditional Romantic concept that individual subject
(and his or her poetry) is inextricably linked with the natural world.[11] Common
to the 'big six' Romantic poets, they shared the belief that an improved world
"could be attained not in the afterlife, but in the real, material world that
they inhabited".[12] Although not as innovative or explicit as the major romantic
writes, they were, arguably, equally committed in their poetry to their forebear's
ideals. Thus in line with this more personal and romantic mode of poetry, poets
in the Georgian mould favoured the use of a more simplistic and subtle language
rather than the didactic and aggressive one that was employed by many of their
predecessors and contemporaries.[13] Walter encapsulates their (general) poetic
philosophy eloquently when he states, "they deliberately avoided the roads their
fathers had built and instead chose to follow the lead set a century earlier
by Wordsworth".[14]
However, when the considering
the Georgians as a movement or a poetic ideal, two important distinctions need
to be made. Firstly, there were essentially two movements, with the second being
different and, arguably, inferior to the first. Walter draws this distinction
by referring to Georgians and Neo-Georgians.[15] In practical terms, this distinction
can be reasonably achieved with the separation of Georgian Poetry I & II from
volumes III & IV. It has been suggested that the poetry in the first two volumes
is, generally, of a higher quality than that which appeared in the subsequent
volumes, albeit with a few notable exceptions (de la Mare for instance). From
the innovative, the poetry became an imitation of the work in previous volumes
in that it has been accused of employing a diluted romanticism, with any expression
of a "personal and profound emotional experience"[16] absent from their compositions.
Although this evaluation
is open to question, it is nevertheless true that the reputation of the Georgians
has been negatively impacted in critical circles because of its association
with the Neo-Georgians. This is because these two movements are frequently placed
under the umbrella term of Georgianism, with the view that the same quality
of work was being produced throughout. Consequently, because the Neo-Georgians
are often viewed - rightly or wrongly - as largely fulfilling "the negative
expectations associated with the Georgian movement, […] they have regrettably
come to represent Georgianism for most critics".[17] Clearly, a result of regarding
the Georgians and the Neo-Georgians together is that the movement as a whole
is frequently discredited, with poets such as de la Mare, whose poetry was included
in all five volumes, suffering.
