Walter de la Mare's anthologies are in a category of their own, indeed, they are of such excellence as to make the description belittling. Walter de la Mare compiled five of them, with commentaries, using poems and passages of prose. All are being reissued in Faber Finds, and to each he brought such a range of reading, wisdom and intelligence as to make them cornucopias of delight and entertainment. Behold, This Dreamer was first published in 1939 and Faber Finds is proud to reissue it seventy years on. Walter de la Mare provides a long introduction which leads to, in his own words, '. . . a Survey - a panorama - of a wide theme, endlessly inviting, in much obscure, viewed from many different angles, by many diverse minds.' To quote from the original blurb, 'Mr de la Mare is concerned not merely with dreaming, whether by night or day, with fantasies, hallucinations, explanations and interpretations of dreams, and the whole business (so to speak) of getting into (as well as out of) the dreamstate. His net is thrown over death as well as sleep, Nature as well as Man: and he takes his soundings in those unconscious and unreasoning depths out of which human personality and art so mysteriously spring.'
Author
Walter John de la Mare was an English poet, short story writer and novelist, probably best remembered for his works for children and The Listeners. He was descended from a family of French Huguenots, and was educated at St Paul's 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; One of de la Mare's special interests was the imagination, and this contributed both to the popularity of his children's writing and to his other work occasionally being taken less seriously than it deserved. 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.
