Charles Tomlinson, 1927–2015

British poet, translator, academic and illustrator Charles Tomlinson has died, reports the University of Bristol. Tomlinson, born in 1927, published his first collection in 1951, and New Collected Poems came out in 2009; in the interim, he either wrote, edited, or translated over 25 books. An excerpt of the remembrance written by colleague and friend Professor David Hopkins:

Charles developed through his career an international reputation as a lecturer, critic, editor and anthologist. His essays on American literature were published as American Essays: Making it New (2001) and his writings on translation, including the Clark Lectures given in Cambridge in 1982, were collected as Metamorphoses: Poetry and Translation (2003). He edited anthologies of critical essays on Marianne Moore (1969), and William Carlos Williams (1972), and compiled two superb anthologies of translated verse, The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation (1980) and Eros English’d: Classical Erotic Poetry in Translation, from Golding to Hardy (1992).

But it was for his poetry that Charles first made his mark, and is perhaps most widely known in the larger literary world. He was one of the first English men of letters to appreciate the great achievements of the American poets of the mid-20th century, particularly the work of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Yvor Winters, Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen – all of whom he came to know personally – and his poetry showed from the start, particularly in its versification, a strong American influence.

From early days, Charles travelled with his family to the USA on a regular basis, holding several visiting professorships and fellowships at distinguished American universities, and his second major collection of poems, Seeing is Believing (1958) appeared in the USA two years before its publication in this country. Charles’s verse – fastidious, meticulously observant of the human and natural world, carefully crafted, but never matter-of-fact or abstract – constituted a radical break with the extravagance of Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse poets who were fashionable in his student days. In a poetic oeuvre which spanned over five decades (his collected poems run to over 700 pages, with a volume of translations from Russian, Spanish, French, and Italian originals [1983] containing over another 100), he established himself as one of the leading English poets of his generation. ‘Only in the greatest poets,’ wrote Donald Davie of Charles’s work, ‘is content so intimately married to form’. ‘His poems,’ wrote Hugh Kenner, ‘are among the best in the English language in this century’.

Charles was a very special colleague and friend. Though one of the most distinguished and respected literary intellectuals of his day, he was entirely without pretention or misplaced vanity. One sometimes forgot that one had someone so famous in one’s midst. The inevitably rather trivial and myopic business of department meetings was, however, always freshened with a new blast of reality when one realised that across the table was someone who had met Ezra Pound, had read The Waste Land aloud in the presence of TS Eliot’s widow, and had perhaps just returned from a weekend with his close friend, the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, or a rendezvous with the Nobel Prizewinner, Octavio Paz.

He will be missed. Listen to Charles Tomlinson read from his poems at PennSound.