Like many famous writers for children, Walter de la Mare had an idyllic early childhood that was cut short too soon....Later he would write that "those happy, unhappy far-away days seem like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting."
For the rest of his life de la Mare would try to recapture the dragonfly. He would also continue to believe that it was better to be a child than an adult. At thirty-one he wrote to a friend that growing up "is a fiasco I am more convinced every day." When he was seventy-five, his biographer, Theresa Whistler (then twenty-one), "protested against this wholesale dismissal of adult life." De la Mare, who had known her since birth, insisted that he was right. "Take your own case," he told her. "Look how diluted you are!"
--Alison Lurie (1926-) in Boys and Girls Forever (2003)
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