[Seeing is Believing] is Tomlinson's third collection of poems, but the first that is both substantial and representative. His first, published quite some years ago by the Hand & Flower Press, contains, as they say, 'prentice-work', promising, intelligent and various, but now interesting chiefly because it shows the poet casting about for the style he wanted. In The Necklace, fifteen poems published four years ago by the Fantasy Press, the style has been achieved completely, but appears a specialized instrument for very special purposes. Special, and limited. Of course. But not at all so limited as people thought. The proof is in this collection, where what is recognisably the same style has been adapted, refined and elaborated so as to serve a much wider range of experience—as wide a range, in fact, as anyone has the right to demand of any poets except the greatest.

The word which the reviewers found for The Necklace was 'imagist'. But it was the wrong word, as Geoffrey Strickland pointed out in this journal; for Tomlinson had entered into his landscapes with far more of himself than an Imagist poet could ever afford to deploy. What he aimed at and achieved was a sensuous apprehension more comprehensive and more comprehending than the Imagist programme, bound to the one sense of sight and the one stance of cool observer, could allow for. Tomlinson's attitude, as distinct from his techniques, was far nearer to Lawrence's (in a poem like 'Snake') than to Pound's or Hulme's. What prompted the word 'imagist' was the one thing no one could deny, however little he might value it: the exquisitely accurate register of sense-impressions. What wasn't realised was that this scrupulous exactness wasn't there for its own sake, but as a discipline and a control; controlling an exceptionally passionate and whole-hearted response to the world, to a world that bore in, not just on the five senses, but also on a man's sentiments, a man's convictions. The American reviewers seem, some of them, to be making the same mistake with this collection.

But for heaven's sake let's not carp at the Americans. They have published, first in their magazines and now in this very elegant book, poems which (as I know) have for years been hawked in vain round the British magazines, the British anthologists and the London publishing houses. All honour to Miss Erica Marx and Mr. Oscar Mellor, and to those editors who have published Tomlinson in British magazines, even if they did choose to print mostly pieces which were marginal and untypical. The blunt fact remains: that The Necklace was unavoidably a slight and fugitive publication, and that otherwise this most original and accomplished of all our post-war poets, profoundly English as he is in his attitudes and nowadays his landscapes, had to wait for a transatlantic critic, Hugh Kenner, to discover him; for transatlantic magazines to publish him in bulk, pay him, and award him prizes; and for a transatlantic publisher to bring him out between hard covers. Your withers, of course; remain unwrung. Am I trying to pretend that this is a national disgrace? Nothing less. But anyhow, the case is no special one: the publication of this volume gives point to desultory arguments that have gone on for some time, about whether New Provincial isn't Old Parochial, whether the glibly cosmopolitan is any worse than the aggressively insular. For Tomlinson's models are largely French and American; that is, he refuses to join the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Eliot and Pound never happened. Tomlinson refuses to put the clock back, to pretend that after Pound and Eliot, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens have written in English, the English poetic tradition remains unaffected. He refuses to honour even the first rule of the club, by sheltering snugly under the skirts of 'the genius of the language'; instead he appears to believe, as Pound and Eliot did before him, that a Valéry and a Mallarmé change the landscape of poetry in languages other than their own. No wonder he doesn't appeal to our Little Englanders.

This, the debt to the French, is the subject of the elaborate tail-piece to this volume, an eight-page poem in six parts entitled 'Antecedents'. It is the only lineal descendent of Pound's 'Mauberley', and worthy of that great original, limited only as that is limited, by offending against Sidney's injunction that the poet should not confound himself with the historian. The hero is Jules Laforgue, introduced in the second section after a brilliant capsulated history of French symbolism as the logical consequence of the Romantic Movement, the whole orchestrated in terms of two arch-Romantic images, sunset and the call of a horn, conflated in a series of synaesthetic perceptions like those of the symbolists themselves ('Slow horn pouring through dusk an orange twilight'). After Byron, Tennyson, Nietzsche, Wagner, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, enter Laforgue:

Will Tomlinson be told to bear his learning more lightly? But where do we find a lighter touch than in the elegant fantasy (adapted from Laforgue himself) which makes of the blank white page and the blank space on the page a polar bear on an icefloe? Mallarmé said, 'L'armature intellectuelle du poème se dissimule et tient—a lieu—dans l'espace qui isole les strophes et parmi le blanc du papier: significatif silence qu'il n'est pas moins beau de composer que les vers.' If this is one of the most perceptive things said about the art of poetry in the last hundred years, how can we maintain that a professional poet should not know this, or that, if he does, he should conceal the fact? But he answers such objections himself:

Except for the strident and typically Poundian pun ('delphini' / 'dauphin's'), this is more Eliotic than Poundian, in the interlarded quotations of course, but more importantly in the Mallarméan syntax which acts out, for instance, the anachronism of Thomas playing in 1940 the Rimbaud game for which the right time was 1870:

This is wit that is something better than deprecating, because this is a poet with something better to write about than himself. Laforgue had nothing better—'He bows to the looking-glass'; and so 'Antecedents' is, as the title says, at once 'A homage and a valediction'. Tomlinson is a post-symbolist poet, not a symbolist absurdly belated. And he is not going to make the mistake he diagnoses in Thomas, of playing Laforgue as Thomas played Rimbaud, a half-century too late.

How to utilise the Symbolist disciplines and procedures whileescaping from the Symbolists' solipsistic trap—this is spelled out in the last section of 'Antecedents', as well as at other points. But Tomlinson's style (and I don't mean the specially contrived style of 'Antecendents') does better than spell out the answer; it exhibits it in living action. For the style which Tomlinson discovered in The Necklace and has here developed so flexibly is not just a way of writing, not at all a way of writing in any sense that is not also a way of perceiving, a way of responding. Central to this style of perceiving is a symbolist idea generally known to us only in the rather special version that Eliot gave of it when he spoke of the objective correlative. It is the idea that an arrangement of objects or events in the apparently external world may so correspond to a pattern of thought and feeling in the mind, that the latter may be expressed and defined in terms of the former. It is against the background of this conviction that Tomlinson can speak (as, to be sure, others have spoken) of 'a certain mental climate', of 'the moral landscape of my poetry in general'. These are something better than metaphors or, if they are metaphors, these metaphors underpin everything Tomlinson writes. Now it is obvious that the idea as just outlined permits of a two-way traffic between the poet's mind and the world: he may proceed from himself outward, starting with a state of feeling in himself and seeking an objective correlative for it; or he may start with perceptions of the objective world, and move inward to find a subjective correlative for them in a state of feeling he induces or imagines. Symbolist poetry characteristically seems to have run the traffic all the first way, to the point indeed at which the reality of the supposedly objective world, as anything but a phantasmal reflection of the subjective, becomes highly questionable. Tomlinson too may run the traffic this way, as when he answers Amis's notorious 'Nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities', by conjuring up cities imagined so as to correspond to states of mind:

Nor forgetting Ko-jen, that
Musical city (it has
Few buildings and annexes
Space by combating silence),
There is Fiordiligi, its sun-changes
Against walls of transparent stone
Unsettling all preconception—a city
For architects (they are taught
By casting their nets
Into those moving shoals); …

But far more characteristically (and specifically so as to escape the Symbolist vertigo about whether the objective exists), Tomlinson runs the traffic the other way, insisting upon the irreducible Otherness of the non-human world, its Presence in the sense of its being present, its being bodied against the senses, as the irreplaceable first principle of all sanity and all morality. Of many statements of this (for it is after all what gives the book its title), I take 'Cézanne at Aix':

And the mountain: each day
Immobile like fruit. Unlike, also
—Because irreducible, because
Neither a component of the delicious
And therefore questionable,
Nor distracted (as the sitter)
By his own pose and, therefore,
Doubly to be questioned: it is not
Posed. It is. Untaught
Unalterable, a stone bridgehead
To that which is tangible
Because unfelt before. There
In its weathered weight
Its silence silences, a presence
Which does not present itself.

Some objections may here be anticipated, and a concession made at no cost (which is that, yes, there are about five unsuccessful poems here, out of thirty-five). It will be objected that the poems are inhuman, that they never deal with people, human relations, human sentiments. In fact, the great advance on The Necklace is precisely here, in commenting (but by implication, always by implication from arrangements of sense-perceptions) on the life of man in history, especially on his communal life as registered by his buildings, by the nature and quality of his tools, by the landscapes he has modified. Secondly, it appears that the readers have difficulty with Tomlinson's metres. Like most of Eliot (and how much else?), the metre is on the uncertain borderline between vers libre and loose (basically four-stress) accentual verse. For my part, I am sure that to count syllables as well as stresses is to have an instrument more delicate and various. But it is disingenuous to object to Tomlinson's metre while accepting Hopkins and Eliot—he is less emphatically muscle-bound than the one, more alert and vigorous than the other. The stops and starts of syntax play over against, and so tauten, the runs and pauses of rhythm; and there is a Hopkinsian (but again less emphatic and so more flexible) richness of orchestration in internal echoes and half-echoes of consonance and assonance, lacing clauses and lines together.

When I turn from these poems to work by highly and justly commended writers, such as R. S. Thomas, say, or even Edwin Muir, what dismays me about these is a pervasive slackness—not in perception nor in seriousness (for both are commonly as honest and truthful as Tomlinson is), but simply in artistic ambition. In their hands the medium is used scrupulously and well, to good and important ends; but it is not wrought up to its highest pitch. They do not say a thing once and for all, then move on fast to another thing. Their expressions could be, not more true, but more forcibly, more brilliantly and compactly true. What people don't realise is that in poetry there can be no question of choosing between the thing well done and the thing done consummately, conclusively. The art imposes its own laws: it demands to be pushed to the extreme, to be wrought up to the highest pitch it is capable of. There are degrees of meritorious performance, certainly, but there can be no question—not for the poet nor for the responsible reader—of preferring the less degree to the greater, as one may prefer weak tea to strong. Thus it is nonsense to say of Tomlinson, as some have said, that of course his diction and his music are choice and distinguished beyond the reach of his contemporaries, but nevertheless a coarser music may be better, a diction more vulgar may be more vigorous and so more valuable. The muse is not to be fooled, and vigour bought at that cost will be soon exhausted As an art, poetry cannot juggle with its own hierarchies. This is also the reason why it cannot stand still; why a poet who writes as if Pound and Mallarmé had never written may have merit, certainly, but other things being equal he can never have equal merit with a poet whose writing acknowledges the heights to which the art was wrought at those hands. This book, I am sure, is a landmark. What a pity it should mark a new peak in the obtuseness of the English to their own poets, as well as a new height gained in the long struggle back to English poetry considered by the poet as a way of spiritual knowledge.