Love

Description

Walter de la Mare was among the leading proponents of the so-called 'Georgian' poets, a loose assembly of influential literary friends who gathered in London in the years leading up to the First World War. Concerned with a refinement of sensibility - in feeling, in expression and in particular in regard to the natural world - the Georgians tapped a popular vein that de la Mare first embraced then later distanced himself from. This engaging assembly of verse and prose, first published in 1943, is de la Mare's vivid survey on love and sensibility, and contains, in his words, 'many of the supreme lyrics in the language'.

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was born in Charlton, Kent. In 1890, aged sixteen, he began work in the statistics department of the London office of Anglo-American Oil. In 1907 he published his first collection of poems under the pseudonym Walter Ramal, but he soon established a wide popular reputation in his own name as a leading poet of the Georgian period with volumes like The Listeners (1912), Motley (1918) and The Veil (1921). He also wrote poetry and short stories for younger readers; Peacock Pie (1913), a collection of poems for children, is now considered a twentieth-century classic.