‘Is there anybody there?’: Solitude and the hermeneutics of love in the writings of Walter de la Mare

Abstract

Solitude and a striving to communicate are major themes in the poetry of Walter de la Mare. While best known for his verse and fiction, de la Mare also produced a series of unconventional anthological works which contain explicit treatments of those themes which are only implicit in his creative work. Drawing on the insights found in these anthologies, this paper argues that, for de la Mare, solitude – along with its opposite state, connectedness – form the endpoints of an axis of concern that is present throughout his body of work.