1 - Place as Universal

Summary

The play of shadows moving on the side of a white van as it drives down a lane, two cups on a table top, the drops of rain clinging to the underside of a garden bench, a misspelling, nothing happening – all these are the stuff of poetry for Charles Tomlinson. Wordsworth once claimed that if human perception were renewed then notions of paradise and Atlantis would no longer be myths but become ‘the growth of common day’. Such a common day is the elusive, sometimes uncanny realm of Tomlinson's poems. Primarily a poet of celebration, Tomlinson is yet no escapist. Now regarded as among the most significant poets writing in Britain after the Second World War, Tomlinson is finally becoming recognized even in his own country, after years in which he was more famous abroad. Nevertheless, after a poetic career of five decades, this study, and another due shortly are the first to appear from British publishers.

If one had to name Tomlinson's subject in one word, that word would be ‘place’. In a reading of his poetry given in Durham in March 1993, Tomlinson twice affirmed that ‘The only universal is place.’ This is a formulation that knowingly defies logic: place, by definition, is always particular, and resists translation into general terms. Tomlinson cites William Carlos Williams in his introduction to Williams's selected poems: ‘The only universal is the local as savages, artists and – to a lesser extent – peasants know’ (Int. 11).

Tomlinson's introduction to his most ‘industrial' volume, The Way In (1974), is a dirge for lost places. The volume partly concerns the demolition or ‘development’ of areas of Bristol, ‘humble and rather fine streets in their unpretentious way’:

the desolation of our urban landscape has produced no place at all, and the way into my book lies through such a stretch of unfeatured surroundings. No name could stick to them. They are the barren outward sign of that mixture of avarice and callous utopianism which robs us of place and places today. (PBSB 74)

What is a place? It names that unique manner of being which must resist the generalities of any pre-given terminology. Place shares with the poetic this quality of resistance to translation.