Passionate Intellect: The Poetry of Charles TomlinsonLiverpool University Press, 1999 M01 1 - 333 pages 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. |
Contents
Prospects | 73 |
Manscapes 19581966 | 127 |
Manscapes 19691978 | 169 |
A Saving Grace | 213 |
Art and Mortality | 243 |
307 | |
329 | |
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Common terms and phrases
American Scenes artist Believing calm celebration Cézanne chapter Charles Tomlinson civility Collected Poems death desert distinction Donald Davie emphasis encounter essay ethic of perception expression fact feeling flow geometry George Oppen grace Holwell Hudson Review human world imagination John Constable Jordi Doce landscape language later light lines Literary Supplement living manscapes Marianne Moore meaning measure memory metaphor mind moral movement mystery Necklace O'Gorman object Octavio Paz once opening opposition oxen paradox perfection phrase PN Review poem's poet Poet as Painter poet's poetic Poetry Book Society Ponte Veneziano possibility present reality reflected relations and contraries relationship romanticism seems sense experience sequence shadow Shaft shapes silence simply Skullshapes Snow sound space speak stanza stone Swigg theme things thought Tomlinson's poems Tomlinson's poetry translation truth University verse vision voice whole William Carlos Williams winter word Written on Water