Charles Tomlinson: An Englishman & the Others

Abstract – This article highlights how the agency of “encounter” and “otherness” plays a crucial role in Tomlinson’s poetic path. This is not simply because the interpenetration of these two elements led to the deconstruction of the traditional notion of border (Saunders 2003), but also because they express the urge experienced by Tomlinson to look for a poetical way characterized by innovation, in both its aesthetics and its techniques. He was inspired by the coeval Americans, exchanging with them, whether in person, via correspondence, or through collaborations, fruitful experiences of poetical dialogue, absorbing from them what Tomlinson defines “talismanic fragments”. In his fundamental work of 1981, Some Americans: A Personal Record, Tomlinson accounts for the development of these mutual exchanges in their views about the notion of “making poetry” to “make it new”. Selected textual examples of direct contact with the poetics and poetical composition of Pound, Moore, Stevens, Williams, Oppen and the Black Mountain Poets will be referred to.