Art and Mortality

Chapter six discusses new concerns and emphases emerging in the 1980s, whilst looking closely at Tomlinson’s poetic performance during the 80s. The chapter seeks to provide some conclusions about the character of his art and make a note of the building sense of relaxation in Tomlinson’s later poetry.

Manscapes 1969–1978

Like the chapter before it, chapter four tracks the development of Tomlinson’s poetry over the latter part of the 20th century. Again, this chapter analyses the human scene and natural landscape in Tomlinson’s ‘human poems’, whilst also adopting a historical approach.

Introduction

In this introductory chapter, Kirkham provides a biography of Charles Tomlinson’s early life to present day. It prepares the reader for the contents of the following chapters and foregrounds Tomlinson’s abilities and status as both a poet and a painter.

One World

Chapter two explores the natural-human world and the sensory and mental experience, aesthetic and moral values in Tomlinson’s poetry and attempts to define the relationship between ‘nature poems’ and ‘human poems’. The chapter looks closely at ‘The Atlantic’ from Seeing is Believing in order to understand the boundaries between the natural world and the human world.

An Ethic of Perception

Chapter one provides a close examination and analysis of Tomlinson’s landscape poems, namely those found in The Way of a World, Seeing is Believing, Written on Water, A Peopled Landscape, American Scenes, Relations and Contraries, Collected Poems, The Necklace, and Mauberley. Kirkham focuses on the ways in which physical landscape in the poems is used in comparison to moral and mental landscapes, and foregrounds Tomlinson’s interest in sense experience.

Manscapes 1958–1966

Chapter three traces a historical progression of Tomlinson’s poetry, focusing closely on the distinction between his ‘nature poems’ and ‘human poems’ published during the twenty year period 1958-1966. The chapter discusses the treatment of human experience within natural landscape and describes the ways in which the two genres of human and nature poetry can exist both separately and in unison.

A Saving Grace

Chapter five begins by providing a brief chronological account of Tomlinson’s poetry published in the 1950s and 1960s, in which Kirkham recalls the literary qualities and aspects discussed earlier in previous chapters. The chapter then goes on to explore the ways of viewing poetry of the 1970s and 1980s as an entity.