Perception and Self in Charles Tomlinson's Early Poetry

Perception and Self in Charles Tomlinson's Early Poetry Michael Hennessy Southwest Texas State University Much recent interest in Charles Tomlinson's poetry has centered on his later work, particularly the long, meditative poems and sequences of poems from The Way ofa World (1969), Written on Water (1972), and The Way In (1974). Although he has favored the meditative style less in the two volumes since The Way In, for many it has become the characteristic mode of his "major" poetry. As a result, his early work is now neglected, relegated more and more to secondary status and viewed largely in the shadow of the body of work which follows it. What I wish to do here is look in some detail at Tomlinson's early poetry, specifically his first two volumes, The Necklace (1955) and Seeing Is Believing (1958).1 In doing so, I aim to challenge the assumption that his early work is a preface to his real achievement, interesting mainly as the work of a poet whose talent — at least initially — was in rendering still lifes and in carefully and precisely recording the contours of the visible world. I believe that even a cursory look at his earliest work shows that Tomlinson is far more than a recorder of surfaces. His first two volumes, it is true, offer a world dominated by the eye; everywhere we are brought into the sheer presence of mass, shape, and color, and our attention is directed continually — as by a painter — towards the subtle shifts of light and hue in the landscape before us. The early poems turn again and again toward the visible world, examining its surfaces and textures and excluding as much as possible the "subjective" interpretations of the poet in favor of a lucid objectivity. But Tomlinson's insistence on "objectively" recording the world's surfaces is neither naive nor simplistic, for he is intent, even as he records, on recognizing the complexity of man's perceptual relationship with the world. In fact, the nature and limits of perception become an implicit theme in much of his early verse, and, although many poems strive simply for an accurate description of the phenomenal world, Tomlinson often questions 1. The Necklace (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1955; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1966); Seeing Is Believing (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958; enlarged ed., London: Oxford University Press, 1960). My quotationsare from the morerecent Oxford editions. 96ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW the very basis for such description. His poems attempt, one critic observes, "to chart the nature of reality as the external world is converted into the internal self, reconstructed and expressed anew."2 It is this process, this interplay between the perceiver and the perceived, the "I" and the "Other," that comes first in Tomlinson's poetry. He is interested, then, not only in recording a world of objects, but in describing the process through which we know that world. Both in The Necklace and Seeing Is Believing, he explores the nature of perception, returning again and again to what he himself has called his "own basic theme — that one does not need to go beyond sense experience to some mythic union, that the T can only be responsible in relationship and not by dissolving itself away into ecstasy or the Over-soul."3 Tomlinson's early poetry, while it acknowledges the capacity of the "I" to shape reality, focuses most intently on the way sense perception limits the self and defines our experiential relation with the world. Typical early poems like "Venice" (N, 1) and "Paring the Apple" (SIB, 23), with their strong visual appeal, demonstrate this interest in sensation and show the direction in which that interest leads Tomlinson. His is an outer-directed, rather than an introspective poetry which — though it does not ignore thought and emotion — generally gives them second billing in favor of a more immediate apprehension of present things. Tomlinson is given over, he says, to "trusting sensation." Although he is obviously a careful and deliberate craftsman, he suggests that a number of his poems " have arisen by writing done very swiftly, before the object, before the actual scene, what was perceived, just as a painter might do...