ENTRY ON CHARLES TOMLINSON FOR CONTEMPORARY POETS

by Barry Goldensohn

Charles Tomlinson is widely spoken of as one of the earliest English poets to learn from the Americans, yet in his work as a whole (that is, in most of its parts) these influences get transmuted into something that is very English. In a wonderful British counter-tradition he is an eccentric of the normal--eccentric in his unflagging urgency, and resolutely normal in the opposition to poetic inflation, as in the poem "Through Binoculars" from The Necklace.

To see thus

Is to ignore the revenge of light on shadow,

To confound both in a brittle and false union

This fictive extension into madness

Has a kind of bracing effect:

That normality is, after all, desirable

One can no longer doubt having experienced its opposite.

In Tomlinson's first three books, Relations and Contraries, The Necklace and Seeing is Believing he uses generic American Modernist diction, rhythms, tone and subjects, and like the Americans he is haunted by Laforgue, Mallarme and Valery. There are lines, phrases and structures that evoke Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Pound and Eliot--and yet by and large the poems are his own. This generalized Modernism made Tomlinson seem like a classic very early in his career.

The borrowed style gradually disappears during the fifties as Tomlinson puts his apprenticeship behind him, but a major trait of his mature work can be found in his earliest poetry--a passion for definition that in the course of his work gets less and less abstract, further from the definitions of taste and style (in the manner of young artists announced as revelations from on high), and the analysis of light, sound and silence in the most abstract terms borrowed from physics, space and time. He is in fact interested in their interaction as if he wanted to make sense of the spacetime of modern physics. What survives from this is sharp observation of nature, cities, architecture, foreign scenes with clearheaded analysis, very little personal reference or rage, passion, wild delight. The characteristic voice is that of the reliable and imaginative observer whose sense of reality and whose reasonable and far-reaching conclusions can be trusted. Like Wordsworth he is an inveterate drawer of morals from what he sees, and like Herbert he is querulous, discursive, and loyally unorthodox, full of subtly persuasive redefinition, etc.

In terms that have a bearing on his own artistic goals, he praises the revolutionary composer Arnold Schoenberg in exile in America:

But to redeem

both the idiom and the instrument

was reserved

to this exiled Jew--to bring

by fiat

certainty from impossibility.

It is typical of Tomlinson's struggle against entrapment by his own strong drive for stability and normalcy that the circle of self and world widen with themes of exile and foreignness, and it is why we find many poems on travel--some of his best work in fact.

We also find a remarkable range of types of poem: modern ballads like "Of Lady Grange" from The Way In; flawless adaptions of eighteenth-century moralized narratives in a series of poems on the French Revolution from The Shaft and a life of Denham, from the same book, that does not contain a false note. There are poems like "Class" and "The Rich" that sound like Larkin, as well. From the latter:

I like the rich--the way

they say 'I'm not made of money':

their favorite pastoral

is to think they're not rich at all--

poorer, perhaps, than you or me,

for they have the imagination of that fall

into the pinched decency

we take for granted.

It is characteristic that he is not interested in the easy wisecrack that would end with the second line, but the sentence drives on for a larger, richer picture that includes the self-reflexive speaker's world. This range, along with the American poems in the style of Williams and Robert Creeley, and the international style in his collaboration on Renga (a cycle of poems) with Octavio Paz, Eduardo Sanguinetti and Jacques Roubaud, give an accurate measure of the depth of his 'myriad-mindedness' and therefore his need for diversity of form and content. There is no hunger to keep in fashion in his many changes--he is an inventor and not a follower.

Tomlinson's carrying rhythm is a vers libere, not-quite-free verse, that suggests an iambic pentameter norm as its background rhythmic ghost. It has gotten closer to a regular iambic meter in the two books of the late eighties, The Return and The Annunciations. These lines from "Carrara Revisited," from the latter book, are quite regular.

Only in flight could you gather at a glance

So much of space and depth as from this height;

Yet flight would blur the unbroken separation

Of fragile sounds from solid soundless--

The chime of metal against distant stone,

The crumple and the crumble of devastation

Those quarries filter up at us.

But while this meter is his most frequent, his departures are highly significant--most notably with the use of William Carlos Williams' "triadic line". Like Williams he can use it for searching and meditative purposes as well as for his surgically

apt description.  These lines are from "The Impalpabilities" in A Peopled Landscape:

It is the sense

of things that we must include

because we do not understand them

the impalpabilities

in the marine dark

the chords

that will not resolve themselves

but hang

in an orchestral undertow

and the brilliant use of Williams' highly personal invention is full and adequate to Tomlinson's needs. (If the lines sound like anyone of the elder generation it is Marianne Moore.)

Many poets regard Tomlinson's inventive use of off-rhyme as one of his greatest gifts to the craft: An example of this brilliance is seen in the analyzed rhyme in the following lines that start "The Oaxaca Bus" from American Scenes:

Fiat Voluntas Tua:

over the head of the driver

an altar. No end to it,

the beginning seems to be

Our Lady of Solitude

blessing the crowd...

Technical questions lead to aesthetic ones, and a recurrent symbol for those, as a stolen theology incorporated into art, is the notion of Eden that appears regularly from Seeing is Believing to The Annunciations. Despite the diversity and increasing maturity of his work, Eden remains his symbol for the perfection that only art can imagine and embody. It is not an idea as fully developed as Yeats' Byzantium, but it is a reminder of the extraordinary potency of art in its dual nature as the lost and the promised, that which is most to be desired and necessary to renounce.