A ghost never exorcized
Stevens in the poetry of Charles Tomlinson
pp. 186-203
in: Bart Eeckhout, Edward Ragg (eds), Wallace Stevens across the atlantic, Berlin, Springer, 2008Abstract
It was not until the 1950s that Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams gained an appreciable audience in Britain, which is much longer than it took their Modernist American contemporaries Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (the fact that London was the centre of operations for the two latter poets is of course relevant). Charles Tomlinson, one of the most "Americanized' of the British poets to come to prominence in the 20 or so years following the Second World War, was instrumental in bringing Williams' poetry to Britain. Less well known, however, is Tomlinson's lifelong engagement with Stevens' poetry. Tomlinson's interest in twentieth-century American poetry is to do with the fact that he considers American poets to be generally more open to European poetry than are their English counterparts, and one reason for his fascination with Stevens is the latter's French Symbolist inheritance.
