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American Essays

Charles Tomlinson

Cover Picture of American Essays
Categories: American
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (192 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2001)
9781857544763
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Charles Tomlinson's Some Americans was an unusual book, combining memoir and the detailed and intimate critical reading of poets he admires. He writes as a poet reading poets and learns less by analysis than by empathy. Thus William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky and Marianne Moore come alive as poets and as presences in their world and in his. So too does the painter Georgia O'Keefe.

    Some Americans is combined here with other essays by Tomlinson, on Elizabeth Bishop, for example, and on Wallace Stevens who was so important to his early work. Tomlinson was one of the first modern English poets to enjoy and assimilate the possibilities offered by American poetry. Here he reveals how and why. A 'trans-cultural element' has always been natural to Tomlinson; his intimate knowledge of French, Russian, Italian, Spanish and Latin-American poetry has informed his poetry and his readership for many years. The debts to American poetry are 'trans-cultural', too, extending the possibilities of the poetic art.

    Charles Tomlinson, born in 1927, studied at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published many books of poetry, and has translated selections from Russian, Spanish and Italian. He is also an artist. He taught at Bristol University, where he was appointed Emeritus Professor of English Poetry. He edited The Oxford Book ... read more
    Awards won by Charles Tomlinson Winner, 2003 New Criterion Poetry Prize (Skywriting)
    Praise for Charles Tomlinson 'Charles Tomlinson has been probably the foremost poet of truly international distinction writing in England between the 1950s and the opening years of the Twenty-first Century.'

    Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence

     'It is entirely appropriate that David Morley should have chosen the title Swimming Chenango Lake for this book and the poem of that name, written in September 1967, stands as 'Prologue' to a volume which will at last place Charles Tomlinson's name at the forefront of the poetry of the twentieth century.'
    Ian Brinton, The London Magazine

    'Tomlinson was a wide-ranging poet. His technical scope includes free form and more traditional structures, and he is a master of both. They cohabit enrichingly in Swimming Chenango Lake... a finely chosen collection for existing enthusiasts and an excellent introduction for newcomers.'
    Carol Rumens, The Guardian
    '€˜His poetry stuns us by its formal rigour, its punctiliousness, its syntactical mastery, its long, building effects. Unmissable.'€™
    Michael Glover, The Tablet
    'Tomlinson is one of the most astute, disciplined, and lucent poets of his generation. His quiet, meditative voice will reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time to come.'
    Edward Hirsch
    'Tomlinson's work and his new volume achieve balance, synthesis and wonderful expression. Add to this that he is also very funny, and I trust you have abandoned any reason not to buy the book. Let's be proud of him.'
    David Morley, the Guardian
    'Tomlinson has an international reputation as a poet and translator. He is also a painter and brings his artist's eye to his poetry, drawing out exact lines, creating luminous imagery that is still touched by a sense of mystery. Please read him...his collection Seeing is Believing is one of my all-time favourites.'
    Sion Hamilton, The Bookseller pick of 2006.
    'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life'.
    William Carlos Williams
    'Against the word as spectacle, Tomlinson opposes the concept -- a very English one -- of the world as event...He is fascinated -- with his eyes open: a lucid fascination -- by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things'.
    Octavio Paz
    'Tomlinson insists, and he has a right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Larkin is. Only in the great poets is content so intimately married to form'.
    Donald Davie
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