Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes. Volume I.

Walter De la Mare wrote poetry that exists in the half-light between waking and dreaming. This first volume gathers his work from 1901 through 1918, a period when he perfected a form of lyrical haunting that has few equals in English verse. His poems inhabit a world where woods breathe, shadows speak, and childhood endures as both paradise and lost country. Here are poems that understand how memory works not as chronology but as atmosphere, how time moves not in straight lines but in circles, how every beautiful thing carries its own quiet grief. The poems gathered here draw readers into landscapes that feel familiar and impossible simultaneously. Nature in De la Mare's hands becomes animate, watchful, teeming with secrets just beyond articulation. Children appear as figures of strange wisdom, inhabitants of a country that can only be revisited, never rejoined. Throughout runs a current of elegy, not for dramatic tragedy but for the small vanishings that make up a life: the passing of an afternoon, the end of innocence, the slow theft of time. De la Mare is a poet of longing, and his longing has a particular quality, less like thirst than like the feeling of almost-remembering something you will never name. This is poetry for readers who do not need to be told what a poem means, who prefer whispers to shouts, who return to certain verses again and again as if they were rooms in a house they once lived in.