Swimming Chenango Lake

Swimming Chenango Lake
Author: Charles Tomlinson
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1784106801

William Carlos Williams valued Charles Tomlinson's poetry: 'He has divided his line according to a new measure learned, perhaps, for a new world. It gives a refreshing rustle or seething to the words which bespeak the entrance of a new life.' Of all the poets of his generation, Charles Tomlinson was most alert to English and translated poetry from other worlds. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz admired how he saw 'the world as event... He is fascinated – with his eyes open: a lucid fascination – by the universal busyness, the continuous generation and degeneration of things.' Tomlinson's take on the world is sensuous; it is also deeply thoughtful, even metaphysical. He spoke of 'sensuous cerebration' as a way of being in the world. His poems are always experimenting with impression and expression. This dynamic selection, edited by the poet and Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley, presents Tomlinson to a new generation of readers.

Cambridge Book of English Verse 1939-1975

Cambridge Book of English Verse 1939-1975
Author: Alan Bold
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1976-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521098403

A collection of poems by the following 19th-20th century English poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, Edwin Muir, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Graves, William Empson, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath.

How Poets See the World

How Poets See the World
Author: Willard Spiegelman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2005-06-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190291834

Although readers of prose fiction sometimes find descriptive passages superfluous or boring, description itself is often the most important aspect of a poem. This book examines how a variety of contemporary poets use description in their work. Description has been the great burden of poetry. How do poets see the world? How do they look at it? What do they look for? Is description an end in itself, or a means of expressing desire? Ezra Pound demanded that a poem should represent the external world as objectively and directly as possible, and William Butler Yeats, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), said that he and his generation were rebelling against, inter alia, "irrelevant descriptions of nature" in the work of their predecessors. The poets in this book, however, who are distinct in many ways from one another, all observe the external world of nature or the reflected world of art, and make relevant poems out of their observations. This study deals with the crisp, elegant work of Charles Tomlinson, the swirling baroque poetry of Amy Clampitt, the metaphysical meditations of Charles Wright from a position in his backyard, the weather reports and landscapes of John Ashbery, and the "new way of looking" that Jorie Graham proposes to explore in her increasingly fragmented poems. All of these poets, plus others (Gary Snyder, Theodore Weiss, Irving Feldman, Richard Howard) who are dealt with more briefly, attend to what Wallace Stevens, in a memorable phrase, calls "the way things look each day." The ordinariness of daily reality is the beginning of the poets' own idiosyncratic, indeed unique, visions and styles.

The Pragmatic Translator

The Pragmatic Translator
Author: Massimiliano Morini
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1441151303

Showcases a descriptive theory of translation based on pragmatics, describing all processes and products of translation on the performative, interpersonal and locative axes.

Selected Poems

Selected Poems
Author: Charles Tomlinson
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1997
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780811213691

Presenting Charles Tomlinson's finest poems, this edition of Selected Poems provides perfect entry into the work of one of England's contemporary masters. Rendering with remarkable precision the response of the poet to the surfaces and depths of things as well as the world of historical necessity, Tomlinson's poems embody aspects of both tragedy and possibility.

Selected Poems

Selected Poems
Author: C. Tomlinson
Publisher: Exile Editions, Ltd.
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1989-07
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780920428276

Passionate Intellect

Passionate Intellect
Author: Michael Kirkham
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9780853235439

This critical study looks at the first four decades of Charles Tomlinson’s poetic career, and is the only published full-scale, exclusive treatment of his poetry. Tomlinson is a major British poet whose work has received more recognition in North America and continental Europe than it has in his own country, where still, in some quarters, its character is misunderstood and therefore misjudged. The purpose of Kirkham’s study is to increase understanding and appreciation of the exceptional achievement of Tomlinson’s poetry, emphasizing both the startling originality of his vision – a unified vision of a natural-human world – and the subtlety of his poetic art. The study is a reading of the poems which aims to show what they yield to close scrutiny and to remove misconceptions. Known for its analytical rendering of sense-impressions and its avoidance of the personal pronoun, the objectivism of Tomlinson’s poetry is not an exercise in asceticism, but a means of enlarging the circumference of the perceiving self, an expansion of self which is not at the same time an inflation of the self-regarding ego. Its theme is not objects as such but relations, the relation of the perceiving self to the other, of the human to the non-human world. Its reputation for cool detachment is based on a misreading: it is a poetry of energy and excitement, which combines self-restraint with passionate conviction.

Seven Pleasures

Seven Pleasures
Author: Willard Spiegelman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2009-04-27
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1429958707

What does it mean to be happy? Americans have had an obsession with "the pursuit of happiness" ever since the Founding Fathers enshrined it—along with life and liberty—as our national birthright. Whether it means the accumulation of wealth or a more vaguely understood notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, happiness has been an inevitable, though elusive, goal. But it is hard to separate "real" happiness from the banal self-help version that embraces mindless positive thinking. And though we have two booming "happiness industries"—religion, with its promise of salvation, and psychopharmacology, with its promise of better living through chemistry—each comes with its own problems and complications. In Seven Pleasures, Willard Spiegelman takes a look at the possibilities for achieving ordinary secular happiness without recourse to either religion or drugs. In this erudite and frequently hilarious book of essays, he discusses seven activities that lead naturally and easily to a sense of well-being. One of these—dancing—requires a partner, and therefore provides a lesson in civility, or good citizenship, as one of its benefits. The other six—reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing—are things one performs alone. Seven Pleasures is a marvelously engaging guide to the pursuit of happiness, and all its accompanying delights.

The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson

The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson
Author: Judith P. Saunders
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838639764

Throughout Charles Tomlinson's fifty-year career, borders have served him as setting, topic, theme, leitmotif, metaphor, and formal principle. Encompassing discussion of more than two hundred individual poems, this study offers a coherent framework for understanding the body of work created by a major, late twentieth-century poet. The borders he explores are spatial, temporal, perceptual, and ideological; thus they comprehend a wide range of concerns, from the ecological to the sociopolitical, the philosophical, the ethical, and the aesthetic. The poems focus on places, literal and figurative, where disparate realms converge, e.g., sites of political and cultural displacement, of theological or economic confrontation. Defining what lies on either side of a given boundary, Tomlinson's work invites a back-and-forth process of comparison and contrast; hence it fosters a dynamic and multifaceted awareness. A commitment to principles of juxtaposition and counterpoint influences the prosodical workings of the poetry as well, manifesting itself in structural patterns, in figurative usage, in deployment of rhyme, in line, in syntax, and in diction.