Behold, This Dreamer!

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".