Charles Tomlinson obituary

The poet Charles Tomlinson has died aged 88, at the Gloucestershire cottage where he had lived since 1958. It is significant that this major English modernist and internationalist should have rooted himself for half a century in a quintessentially rural corner of England. He advocated the poetry of Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney and Keith Douglas before it was fashionable to do so. DH Lawrence was his witness that “all creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with the spirit of place”, to which Tomlinson added: “Since we live in a time when place is threatened by the violence of change, the thought of a specific soil carries tragic implications.”

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.

He was born into a working-class family, son of Alfred Tomlinson and May Lucas, in Stoke-on-Trent, “a land / Too handled to be primary – all the same / The first in feeling” (At Stoke, 1974). He contrasted his background in the Potteries with that of other working-class poets whose circumstances resulted in a politics of resentment. For his part, he was glad not to have suffered “the soft oppression of prosperity”. An early epiphany was seeing a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in a dentist’s waiting room. “My own long poem, The Return,” he said, “celebrates our ‘deprived’ youth which turns out to have been full of unsuspected possibilities.” He found his own way, taking nothing for granted, advancing in a spirit of heightened wakefulness.

The chances of rhyme are like the chances of meeting –
In the finding fortuitous, but once found, binding …
(The Chances of Rhyme, 1969)

He attended Longton high school, Staffordshire, then Queens’ College, Cambridge, taking his degree in 1948. In the same year, he married Brenda Raybould, who later became a sure interpreter of his work, attending him in his blindness and easing his difficult last years.

After Cambridge, he became lecturer, reader and then, from 1982 until 1992, professor of English at the University of Bristol; he also taught in the US and elsewhere. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1974 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, was appointed CBE in 2001, and received five honorary doctorates, a Cholmondeley award from the Society of Authors, and various American and Italian honours.

At Queens’ he studied with the young Donald Davie, who became an advocate and friend. Davie used to say that Tomlinson taught him to see, architecture in particular; and that he taught Tomlinson to read, syntax in particular. Tomlinson was a superb syntactician: his long verse sentences can unfold with Coleridgean assurance or build with Paterian design.

He was hostile to the narrow parameters of the 1950s Movement with which Davie was associated. In poems such as More Foreign Cities (1956), he answers that narrowness not by argument but by example: the exotic actuality of a wider world, different cultures, climates and lights.

He regretted that “the English have rather sloppy ideas about the relation between mind and feelings and one can only sigh and go on believing there is such a thing as passionate intellect”. He looked to the Italians and the French for a poetry of “sensuous cerebration”: feeling thinks, and thinking feels.

He was impatient with verbal excess, whether of a confessional or an apocalyptic kind. “I wanted precision,” he said. “This was at the time when Dylan Thomas represented one of the norms in poetry, and the weaker side of Thomas – his playing with words as if they were Plasticine – seemed to me a threat to what I should call a civil language.” His 18th-century sense of the responsibilities of poetry, like Davie’s, looked for balance in a disrupted modern world. Unlike Davie and other contemporaries, he never became an ironist.

Repelled by prescriptions – formal, political, religious – he maintained an alert interest in other poetries and other arts: music, architecture, sculpture, painting. He was an accomplished graphic artist. And he never tired of travel in space and language, though he always homed to his cottage in Gloucestershire, and to an English enriched by his translations from the Russian of Fyodor Tyutchev, the Spanish of Antonio Machado, César Vallejo and Octavio Paz, the Italian of Giuseppe Ungaretti and others, and the French poets. Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Paz collaborated with him on Renga (1979), a poem in four languages. His translations represented a significant second body of poetic work. He edited the seminal Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980), demonstrating the centrality of translation to the history of our magpie literature, and how strategies of translation have evolved over six centuries. He agreed with the American poet Kenneth Rexroth that “translation saves you from your contemporaries”.

Some slightly older Americans, too, saved him from his English contemporaries. William Carlos Williams “helped make clearer the inherent rubato of speech. Furthermore, I liked his ability to deal with phenomena unegotistically – a piece of paper blowing across the street, a yellow chimney emitting smoke, all the miscellany and detritus of what just lies around.” The work of Marianne Moore was one of his early transatlantic enthusiasms. Wallace Stevens proved almost too intoxicating for him, until the antidotes of Williams and Pound were applied. Louis Zukofsky and Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson also affected him.

His verse is fastidious, the images seen not just once but at different times, from different angles. In his formative years he was “obsessed by cinema. The kind of fluidity of movement and clarity of image I tried for …” In Assassin (1969), for example, he finds a whole voice for Trotsky’s murderer, gets inside his experience, and a politics anathema to his own finds expression (undermined by action). French Revolutionaries, Alexander Scriabin and other romantics and radicals find voices within a known and brutally corrective history, their “merciless patience” giving way to “the daily prose such poetry prepares for”.

Tomlinson’s mature poems explore civic values: balance, receptivity, justice. His language is aesthetically and morally alive to “the avarice and callow utopianism” that has inflicted on English cities a modern damage more lasting than that done in the second world war, opening the way to an almost, but not quite, irreversible impoverishment of spirit.

He is survived by Brenda and their two daughters.