Charles Tomlinson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 8 January 1927 |
| Died | 22 August 2015(2015-08-22) (aged 88) |
| Occupation | Poet, translator, academic, and illustrator |
| Language | English |
| Education | Queens' College, Cambridge Royal Holloway |
Alfred Charles Tomlinson (8 January 1927 – 22 August 2015) was an English poet, translator, academic, and illustrator.[1] He was born inPenkhull, and grew up in Basford,Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.[2]
After attendingLongton High School, Tomlinson read English atQueens' College, Cambridge, where he studied withDonald Davie. He married Brenda Raybould (1928–2019) in 1948 in Willesden and, during a happy and enduring marriage, had two daughters: Justine (born 1957) and Juliet (born 1961), both of whom became professional musicians. After leaving university he taught for several years in Camden Town, London, followed by a brief period as secretary toPercy Lubbock in Italy, before returning to London as an M.A. student atRoyal Holloway, University of London. He subsequently taught for thirty-six years in the English Department of Bristol University, where he became Emeritus Professor. He was also a graphic artist, andIn Black and White: The Graphics of Charles Tomlinson, with an introduction by Nobel prize-winnerOctavio Paz, was published in 1975 and was the focus of a December 1975 edition of theBBC television seriesArena.
Tomlinson's first book of poetry was published in 1951, and hisCollected Poems was published by theOxford University Press in 1985, followed by theSelected Poems: 1955–1997 in 1997. His poetry won international recognition and received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award fromHudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesie Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. He was an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and of the Modern Language Association. Tomlinson was made aCBE in 2001 for his contribution to literature. HisSelected Poems, his collectionsSkywriting,Metamorphoses, andThe Vineyard Above the Sea, among others, are published byCarcanet Press. His last collection,Cracks in the Universe, was published in May 2006 in Carcanet Press' Oxford Poets series.
In his bookSome Americans Tomlinson acknowledges his poetic debts to modern American poetry, in particularWilliam Carlos Williams,George Oppen,Marianne Moore, andLouis Zukofsky, as well as artists likeGeorgia O'Keeffe andArshile Gorky. In his critical studyLives of Poets,Michael Schmidt observes that 'Wallace Stevens was the guiding star [Tomlinson] initially steered by'.[3] Schmidt goes on to define the two characteristic voices of Tomlinson: "one is intellectual, meditative, feeling its way through ideas" while the other engages with "landscapes and images from the natural world".[4] Tomlinson's poetry often circles around these themes of place and return, exploring his native landscape of Stoke and the shifting cityscape of modern Bristol.[3] In his poem "Against Extremity", Tomlinson expresses distrust of confessional verse and rejects the "willed extremism of poets likeSylvia Plath andAnne Sexton".[4]The inspired poem is dedicated to the Argentine philosopher and poet Eduardo Sanguinetti, which he calls "Dialectic".[5]
From 1985 to 2000, Tomlinson recorded all of his published poetry for Keele University as well as his translations (with Henry Gifford) of poetry by Antonio Machado and Fyodor Tyutchev. He also recordedThe Waste Land byT. S. Eliot. All these recordings, apart fromThe Waste Land, but including Tomlinson's interviews with Octavio Paz, Hugh Kenner and Sean Street, can be heard online at the Charles Tomlinson page of PennSound, University of Pennsylvania.
Tomlinson was an authoritative translator of poetry from Russian, Spanish and Italian, including work byAntonio Machado,Fyodor Tyutchev,César Vallejo, andAttilio Bertolucci. He collaborated with Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud and Edoardo Sanguinetti in the writing ofRenga, and with Paz alone in the writing ofAirborn/Hijos del Aire. He editedThe Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation and theSelected Poems ofWilliam Carlos Williams. Other edited works includeMarianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays,William Carlos Williams: A Critical Anthology,George Oppen: Selected Poems,Eros English'd: Classical Erotic Poetry in Translation from Golding to Hardy, andJohn Dryden: Poems. His poetry has been translated into Spanish by Jordi Doce andOctavio Paz, into Italian by Silvano Sabbadini, Edoardo Zuccato, and others, and into French byMichele Duclos.
