The Influence of William Carlos Williams on Charles Tomlinson’s Cityscapes

The influence William Carlos Williams exercised on succeeding generations of American poets is widely recognized and much discussed, but less attention has been paid to the international impact of his work. Writing in the tradition of Walt Whitman, as he himself acknowledges in the introductory comments to Paterson, Williams might be supposed to exert small appeal as a model for European authors (Author’s Note). He has been identified, nonetheless, as a valued influence in the poetic development of an important Post-war British poet: Charles Tomlinson (1927–). One of the preeminent voices in contemporary British poetry, Tomlinson has acknowledged the significance of a number of American writers to his work, among them Williams. The most readily apparent aspect of that influence is formal, namely, Tomlinson’s deft handling of the short line and of the triadic stanza.¹ Reading Williams “seriously” for the first time in 1956, as he reports in his memoir Some Americans: A Personal Record, he discerned in Williams’s re-working of the poetic line intriguing rhetorical potential: “It was the three-ply poems that appealed to me most, perhaps because they afforded the possibility of a more meditative movement” (5, 16). Initially, Williams’s work offered the young British poet a model for presenting the mind in the process of active engagement—sometimes musingly, sometimes playfully, sometimes questioningly—in a “poem made out of anything and with a jagged pattern” (Tomlinson “Introduction” xii).

Tomlinson’s experimentation with the three-ply stanza elicited a favorable response: Williams received this evidence of homage from a young British poet with gracious enthusiasm, welcoming Tomlinson into “a small clan” of forward-looking writers: “I am amazed that your lines fall so easily and beautifully into the patterns of my verses [ . . . ]. It makes me feel that my deviations are valid and not mere eccentricities—and that they may be susceptible of proliferation,” Williams wrote (qtd. in Some Americans 18). Proud to be admitted to Williams’s “clan,” Tomlinson welcomed such signs of fellowship after the “almost complete poetic isolation” in which he had previously worked (Some Americans 8).² He continued to utilize the triadic stanza, composing more than twenty poems in this form. Adopting it into his formal repertoire, he made it fully his own in poems such as “The Impalpabilities,” “At Wells: polyphony,” “Ode to Arnold Schoenberg,” or “Small Action Poem.” His formal legacy from Williams is buttressed, moreover, by less overtly demonstrable commonality in purpose and approach. Noting that the overlap in their formal predilections is limited—”the main body of the work I had already accomplished had very little to do with Williamsite procedures”— Tomlinson was persuaded from the outset that his own poetry “intersected at certain points with [Williams’s] concerns” (Some Americans 19). In his 1994 book, Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition, Richard Swigg explores this intersection of concern, arguing that the younger poet shares Williams’s respect for “the solid otherness” of things, (87) for “a plurality of phenomena independent of our egotistic projection and unblurred by myth” (13). “Outside / outside myself / there is a world,” Williams declares, “a world [ . . . ] which I approach concretely” (“Sunday in the Park,” P 1–3, 5–8). “Through Williams,” Swigg suggests, “Tomlinson gains not just lineal flexibility, but also access to a tradition of factuality in American writing” (99–100).

Tomlinson’s commitment to mediating an external reality that he, as poet, refuses to control or judge, can be traced throughout his work. His openness to the world outside himself manifests itself with particular clarity, moreover, in poems depicting urban environments. Although he is admired for his portrayal of the natural world, Tomlinson is equally a poet of human habitation and interior spaces: houses, rooms, villages, towns, and cities. In nearly every volume of his poems, as he reminds one interviewer, “there are cityscapes,” for “there are certain big cities that fascinate” (Ross 35, 34). He is a cosmopolitan poet whose “Williams-like feeling for the localized” manifests itself in many different part of the globe (Swigg 15): Rome, London, Lisbon, Barcelona, San Juan, Manhattan, Mexico City...