Abstract
It was not until the 1950s that Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams gained an appreciable audience in Britain, which is much longer than it took their Modernist American contemporaries Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (the fact that London was the centre of operations for the two latter poets is of course relevant). Charles Tomlinson, one of the most ‘Americanized’ of the British poets to come to prominence in the 20 or so years following the Second World War, was instrumental in bringing Williams’ poetry to Britain. Less well known, however, is Tomlinson’s lifelong engagement with Stevens’ poetry. Tomlinson’s interest in twentieth-century American poetry is to do with the fact that he considers American poets to be generally more open to European poetry than are their English counterparts, and one reason for his fascination with Stevens is the latter’s French Symbolist inheritance.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Bedient, Calvin. Eight Contemporary Poets. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Edwards, Michael. ‘The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson’. Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist. Ed. Kathleen O’Gorman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. 136–52.
Gelpi, Albert. ‘Stevens and Williams: The Epistemology of Modernism’. Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 3–23.
Hamilton, Ian. ‘Four Conversations’. London Magazine 4 (Nov. 1964): 64–85.
John, Brian. The World as Event: The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.
Orr, Peter. ‘Charles Tomlinson’. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert. Gen. ed. Peter Orr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. 250–5.
Ross, Alan and Charles Tomlinson. ‘Words and Water, an Interview’. Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist. Ed. Kathleen O’Gorman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. 21–37.
Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966.
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.
Swigg, Richard. Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1994.
Tomlinson, Charles. The Necklace. Swinford: Fantasy Press, 1955. Reissued with an Introduction by Donald Davie. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Tomlinson, Charles. Some Americans: A Personal Record. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981. (Abbreviated as SA.)
Tomlinson, Charles. Collected Poems. 1985. Enlarged edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (Abbreviated as TCP.)
Tomlinson, Charles. ‘Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Scepticism’. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Ed. Boris Ford. Vol. 9: American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. 393–409. (Abbreviated as WSPS.)
Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Young, Alan. ‘Rooted Horizon: Charles Tomlinson and American Modernism’. Critical Quarterly 24 (Winter 1982): 67–73.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Gareth Reeves
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reeves, G. (2008). A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson. In: Eeckhout, B., Ragg, E. (eds) Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583849_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583849_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35850-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58384-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)