Walter de la Mare's poetry has not received the attention from serious critics that it deserves. It was his misfortune to live through and to be intellectually and poetically unaffected by the two movements in England that shaped the literary consciousness of its intelligentsia during his lifetime. His reputation was formed--with The Listeners and Other Poems (1912), Peacock Pie (1913), Motley and Other Poems (1918), and The Veil and Other Poems (1921)--in the very years of literary and artistic innovation that saw the emergence of the poetic revolution led by Pound and Eliot; the rest of his poetic career coincided with the growth and institution of a critical orthodoxy--indebted to Eliot's early criticism and associated with I. A. Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis in England, and with the "new critics" John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks in the United States--that came to dominate the study of poetry...