Walter John De La Mare was born April 25, 1873, in London to James Edward de la Mare, a principal at the Bank of England, and Lucy Sophia, James' second wife and the daughter of Scottish naval surgeon and author Dr. Colin Arrott Browning.
He was educated at the St. Paul Cathedral School before getting a job in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil, where he worked from 1890 to 1908. However, he still found time to write, and through the efforts of Sir Henry Newbolt, La Mare eventually received a Civil List pension which enabled him to quit his job and write full time.
In 1892, De La Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met and fell in love with Constance Elfrida Ingpen, the leading lady. They were married in 1899 and went on to have four children. Sadly, his wife got diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1940 and ended up dying three years later.
De la Mare was a notable writer of ghost stories and other supernatural tales, and those horror writings were a favorite of H. P. Lovecraft, who, in his classic study Supernatural Horror in Literature, remarked that "He [De La Mare] is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve."
De La Mare has since been touted as one of modern literature’s chief exemplars of the romantic imagination. He's also labeled as an "escapist who retreats from accepted definitions of reality and the relationships of conventional existence."
His approach to reality, however, is not escapist; rather, it profoundly explores the world he considered most significant—that of the imagination
Walter De la Mare suffered from coronary thrombosis and died on June 22, 1956, at the ripe old age of 83. His ashes are now interred under the St. Paul Cathedral School, where he once attended.
To learn more about this author, visit the link above or check out his Wikipedia Page.
Poems used in this episode are The Ghost, The Disguise, The Marionnettes, Dust to Dust, and Motley. Find them all on Project Gutenberg!
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