In this and the previous chapter I am giving equal attention to the changes of direction in Tomlinson's development and to the continuity of thought and outlook. I introducedthesequenceof1950s and1960s poems with a discussion of ‘Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole’, in Seeing is Believing, since one can observe there the process by which an Ethicof perception is transformed into ane thic of attitude and action. I turned then to poems concerned with civility and civilization in this and the succeeding collection, A Peopled Landscape. The preoccupation with this theme persisted in American Scenes, but the very different landscapes and cultural circumstances of the New World required a different approach and produced a different emphasis. Finally, in the desert poems and ‘The Fox’, I noted a transition from a focus on the civilizing enterprise to the theme of being.

The Way of a World (1969), the successor to American Scenes, contains by general agreement many of Tomlinson's finest poems.‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, awell-knownand frequently anthologized poem, is referred to brie?y in this chapter; others I have discussed in the first two chapters: ‘Eden’, ‘Adam’, ‘In the Fullness of Time’, ‘A Sense of Distance'and ‘Skullshapes’,which is just one of a remarkable series of prose poems. My list would also include—although they are not treated in this book—‘Words for the Madrigalist’ (which once, however, had a place in Chapter 1) and ‘The Chances of Rhyme’.Two others,‘Assassin’ and ‘Prometheus’, with which a new subject-matter, revolutionary politics, entered Tomlinson's poetry, will be discussed at length.

I begin with‘Descartes and the Stove’ (CP p. 196), however, since it shares the theme of being with‘The Fox’ and the desert poems in the previous collection and itsmoral vision with the political poems that are its neighbours in The Way of a World. The poet has returned from the relative informality of style and presentation, the jagged edges and the imagistic shorthand, of American Scenes to an ampler rhetoric, a more urbane tone and intellectual diction, a no less imagistic but carefully conducted, developed argument.