Walter John de la Mare 1873 TO 1956 was an English poet, short story writer and novelist probably best remembered for his works for children and The Listeners. He was born in Kent and was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School.
His first book, Songs of Childhood was published under the name Walter Ramal. He worked in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil for eighteen years while struggling to bring up a family, but nevertheless found enough time to write, and, in 1908, through the efforts of Sir Henry Newbolt he received a Civil List pension which enabled him to concentrate on writing.
De la Mare also wrote some subtle psychological horror stories; "Seaton's Aunt" and "Out of the Deep" are noteworthy examples. His 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.De la Mare described two distinct types of imagination , although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. It was at the border between the two that Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.
De la Mare claimed that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. In his lecture, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, he argued that children are not so closely confined and bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons .They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." Doris Ross McCrosson summarizes this passage, Children are, in short, visionaries. This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality or, in a limited sense, both.The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which retires like a shocked snail into its shell. From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes
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