Charles Tomlinson

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. Cosmopolitan, intellectual, and polyglot, he has achieved an original blend of the high modernist tradition, English Romantic aesthetics and contemporary phenomenology. His work forms, in his own words, a ‘phenomenology of perception’, one adapted to what could be termed an environmentalist ethic and aesthetic, a defence of the irreducible idioms of ‘place’. 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.