"John Betjeman said: “I hold Charles Tomlinson’s poetry in high regard. His is closely wrought work, not a word wasted … ” For the American objectivist poet George Oppen, “it is [Tomlinson] and Basil Bunting who have spoken most vividly to American poets”. Tomlinson bridged the vast gulf between old and new world poetry, and was an heir equally of Dryden and Williams, Coleridge and Pound. His 16 collections of poetry, books of essays, translations and anthologies are a core resource for English writers and readers of the last half-century, yet he has been more honoured abroad than at home."
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I was self-directed to an old edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry after reading, on the inside cover of the October 2015 edition of Poetry magazine, a 9-line offering by Tomlinson which I found at once inspiring, not merely because of its quiet elegance, but also because of its bone-touching, truth-showing, powerful message: We are not alone during our lives, and we will never be alone, not even in death. Certainly, Tomlinson, even in death, communes with the natural world in all of its wonder.
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Below another 9 lines, these from the final stanza of Tomlinson's poem, "On the Hall at Stowey", I offer proof of that assertion.
"Five centuries. And we? What we had not
Made ugly, we had laid to waste--
Left (I should say) the office to nature
Whose blind battery, best fitted to perform it
Outdoes us, completes by persistence
All that our negligence fails in. Saddened,
Yet angered beyond sadness, where the road
Doubled upon itself I halted, for a moment
Facing the empty house and its laden barns."
