"In 1962, when asked whether it was a good or bad period for writing poetry, Robert Graves replied, not unreasonably, 'there's nothing wrong with the period, but where are the poets?'" -- from the introduction to The World as Event. Brian John suggests that the work of Charles Tomlinson should be granted equal prominence. Tomlinson, never an imitator, has remained isolated from groups and uninfluenced by movements. Although his reputation as a major contemporary British poet was established early in the United States, his work met with little notice in Great Britain. Even now, he is more accepted and appreciated outside his homeland. Tomlinson suffers, as did Keats and Tennyson, from the accusation that his poetry is essentially "un-British." Brian John observes in his introduction that "Wherever he has sought enrichment of his art, however, Tomlinson has remained intrinsically an English poet, intent upon re-awakening English sensibilities to the real nature of the world. 'I write as an Englishman who has responded to other horizons,' he declared in 1987, 'internationally minded, though with the ballast of England and English to keep him -- Wordsworth's favourite word -- steady.'" John presents a perceptive view of Tomlinson's work, giving attention to the meaning of his poetry and tracing the sources of both his literary and philosophical thinking.

Ever since his early collections of the late 1950s and early 1960s repudiated the parochialism of some of the 'Movement' poets, Charles Tomlinson has formed a unique voice in contemporary British poetry. This book, the first on this major English writer from a British publisher, forms a comprehensive defence of Tomlinson's project, including his work as a graphic artist, as a translator, and as a participator in experiments in multiple authorship and multi-lingual poetry.

"The poetry of Charles Tomlinson is distinguished by its respect for the world as objective fact - as set apart from human mythmaking, symbolizing, and egotistic projection. In Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition, Richard Swigg examines the amazingly versatile speech and relationship that Tomlinson has brought to the concreteness of nature and city from the early poems of the 1940s up to the late 1980s by assessing the achievement within an Anglo-American tradition of factuality from which Tomlinson has drawn strength and which his work now illuminates." "Blake's gleaming particularities, Constable's "science" of painting, Ruskin's visual energy, Emerson's and Wordsworth's delight in humble solidities, Whitman's celebration of American facts - all belong to the lineage that, as Tomlinson's poetry reveals, takes on new expression in the modernism of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. This book traces Tomlinson's debt to Stevens and Moore in his poetry of the 1950s, but gives special attention to the larger influence and widening of range that the art of William Carlos Williams exerted on the poetry of the 1960s and after. Williams's sense of the local as a way into the universal touches a theme that has special significance for Tomlinson's Englishness and internationalism, particularly in the way that this double quality gives us new insight into the poetry of other Englishmen (Ivor Gurney and D. H. Lawrence in relation to Whitman; Edward Thomas in relation to Robert Frost) who also sought New World precisions to speak their nativeness." "The volume's close attention to the vocal grain and texture of many individual poems is especially marked in a chapter devoted to Tomlinson's politico-historical poems on Danton, Charlotte Corday, and Machiavelli. The poet not only provides a perspective on T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz, but - in a poem about Trotsky's assassination - draws on the singular American quality of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane." "Swigg assesses Tomlinson's stature in post-war British poetry by contrasting his work with that of Philip Larkin and W. H. Auden and by demonstrating how much he shares with David Jones and Basil Bunting. The latter two, English internationalists of The Anathemata and Briggflatts, have, like Tomlinson, won their way home to a Britain of spiritual density and concreteness."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This critical study looks at the first four decades of Charles Tomlinson’s poetic career, and is the only published full-scale, exclusive treatment of his poetry. Tomlinson is a major British poet whose work has received more recognition in North America and continental Europe than it has in his own country, where still, in some quarters, its character is misunderstood and therefore misjudged. The purpose of Kirkham’s study is to increase understanding and appreciation of the exceptional achievement of Tomlinson’s poetry, emphasizing both the startling originality of his vision – a unified vision of a natural-human world – and the subtlety of his poetic art. The study is a reading of the poems which aims to show what they yield to close scrutiny and to remove misconceptions. Known for its analytical rendering of sense-impressions and its avoidance of the personal pronoun, the objectivism of Tomlinson’s poetry is not an exercise in asceticism, but a means of enlarging the circumference of the perceiving self, an expansion of self which is not at the same time an inflation of the self-regarding ego. Its theme is not objects as such but relations, the relation of the perceiving self to the other, of the human to the non-human world. Its reputation for cool detachment is based on a misreading: it is a poetry of energy and excitement, which combines self-restraint with passionate conviction.