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1927-
Very few poets alive write so consistently well, and very few have been so experimental in rhythms inside the main stream of the English language." Peter Levi
Born in Stoke-on-Trent, 8th January 1927, Tomlinson was educated at the local high school and went on to read English at Queen's College Cambridge as an exhibitioner. He spent several years in elementary school teaching, followed by a year in Italy, and subsequently taught at Bristol University for thirty-six years, first as lecturer, then as Professor of English Literature. He also travelled widely in Europe, the States and Mexico, spending a year as visiting professor at the University of New Mexico.
His early poetry (beginning with his first published pamphlet, Relations and contraries in 1951) received greatest attention and appreciation in America, and his reputation as a major contemporary British poet was established there at a time when his work met with little notice in his home country.
As well as a poet ("My theme is relationship"), Tomlinson is known and admired as a translator, and as an editor (of The Oxford book of verse in English translation, of collections of critical essays on Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, and of Williams' Selected poems. Williams said of Tomlinson's poetry: "[it] gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life."
In Tomlinson's own words: "Translation has been an accompanying discipline and so have drawing and painting." He held a one-man show at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London in 1972, and three years later a selection of his graphic work was published (In black and white).
Among many honours and awards during his long and prolific career, Tomlinson received the Bennett Award for achievement in literature from The Hudson Review in 1993, the New Criterion Poetry prize for Skywriting and other poems in 2003 and has been awarded the CBE for services to literature.
He now lives in Gloucestershire, and continues to publish new work in the New Criterion Journal.
In reading Charles Tomlinson I get the feeling that the important thing is happening, that English verse is taking a small but real step forward.
(P. N. Furbank writing about A Peopled Landscape)
Selected books by the author. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are available in the West Midlands Creative Literature Collection
The necklace (1955) *
Seeing is believing (1958)
A peopled landscape (1963)
American scenes and other poems (1966) *
The way of a world (1969) *
Words and images (1972)
Written on water (1972) *
The way in (1974) *
The shaft (1978) *
Selected poems 1951-74 (1978) *
Selected poems 1955-1997 (1997) *
The vineyard above the sea (2000)
Skywriting and other poems (2003)
Cracks in the universe (2006)
Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev 1803-1873 (1960)
Castilian ilexes: versions from Antonio Machado (with
Henry Gifford) (1963)
Ten versions from Trilce, by César Vallejo
(1970)
Some Americans (1981)
Poetry and metamorphosis (1983)
Metamorphoses (2003)
The website Charles Tomlinson, English poet; Resources for students, readers and scholars... is very comprehensive. http://www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/CharlesTomlinson_index.htm
Charles Tomlinson, man and artist, edited by Kathleen O'Gorman (1988)
The world as event: The poetry of Charles Tomlinson by Brian John (1989)
Charles Tomlinson and the objective tradition by Richard Swigg (1994)
Charles Tomlinson by Timothy Clark (1999)
Passionate intellect; the poetry of Charles Tomlinson by Michael Kirkham (1999)
Page created 22 November 2002 and last
updated 3 November 2006
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