ABSTRACT
Tomlinson’s love of travel, his knowledge of European languages and literature, and his attunement to American poets who were unfashionable or unknown in postwar Britain, are all stressed; at the same time, equal emphasis is placed upon his opposition to the Movement and his difference from Larkin. Tomlinson’s bursts of anger, his Yeatsian haughtiness, his moments of rapture, his irony, and his occasional comicality combine to produce a poetic character, which cannot merely be labelled impersonal or cold. Attentive and thorough reading of Larkin and Tomlinson’s poems reveals the necessity of recognizing these emotions and accepting their place in a fundamentally secular framework; it becomes imperative to recognize and delineate the contours of these poets’ idealism as well as their spiritual sense. Larkin and Tomlinson are exceedingly careful and controlled artists. Poetry, however, especially the lyric, insists upon its right to remove the voice from the everyday realm.
