2 - The Poem as Event

Summary

NOT IN SEQUENCE OF A METRONOME

The first thing that strikes anyone opening a book of Tomlinson's verse is the elegant appearance of the poems on the page. Blank verse and octosyllabic poems present a braid of indented and unindented lines, freer measures announce themselves by patterns of spacing between lines and against margins. Deeper analysis of Tomlinson's work must begin by attention to the artisanal and musical skills that have made him perhaps the most rhythmically innovative poet of his generation.

For many years Tomlinson was regarded as a strange cultural cross-breed – an English poet whose work is marked by certain formal revolutions in American poetry. Tomlinson discovered the American poet Marianne Moore while an undergraduate at Cambridge, a time when he was modelling himself on Blake and Whitman. The following passage also describes many of the traits of Tomlinson's mature work:

What would [my roommate] have thought of the way the title became the subject of the first sentence of the poem?

The Fish

wade

through black jade.

No, I couldn't possibly have this doubted and discussed. I would have to explain also the appeal of the splitting of article from noun on two occasions and in two ways:

… the submerged shafts of the

sun,

split like spun

glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

into the crevices –

in and out, illuminating

the

turquoise sea

of bodies….

The dividing off of parts of language, the perceptual accuracy, the unexpected addition – ‘of bodies’ – to the apparently complete ‘turquoise sea’, the deft rhyming – these taught me more than I could yet confess to have learned. Why, when I admired this sort of thing, and was looking at Cézanne in the Fitzwilliam Museum, did I imagine I was a Whitmanian vitalist? The conscious mind is a shallow thing. Or rather, it is seldom conscious enough at the right moment. (SA 4–5)

Tomlinson's work of the 1950s and early 1960s appropriated and exploited methods developed by such American writers as Ezra Pound, Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and the ‘Objectivists’ (Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen), long before many of them were known or even available on this side of the Atlantic.