‘Manscapes’ is a heading in The Way In (1974) under which Tomlinson has grouped a series of poems chiefly about the industrial English Midlands in which he spent his youth and generally about the urban universe of the twentieth century; the coinage implies an opposition between manscapes—these manscapes—and landscapes. In using the term as my title for this and the next chapter I am broadening its application. The subject of these chapters is Tomlinson's treatment of human experience. During the twenty-year period covered, from 1958 to1978, there is a notable development of interests, which is best presented chronologically: in each collection the poet turns to new areas of human experience and introduces new themes and emphases, changes of attitude and focus.

Insomuch as the ethic of perception is operative in these poems as in the rest of Tomlinson's work, governing his outlook, providing the terms of signification and judgement, they too testify to the existence of that ‘one world'which in the previous chapter I chose to demonstrate by tracing a line of continuity from nature poem to human poem. These chapters, however, emphasize not the thematic connection between the two kinds of poem but the manner in which perceptual categories are used to interpret the human content of the poems.

The title of his second collection, Seeing is Believing (1958), announced the conviction informing all his work. When he called his next collection A Peopled Landscape (1963) his intention was, no doubt, to reaffirm this conviction as much as to indicate what was new in it. The nature poems in the early collections are also, in at least two senses, human-nature poems: their theme is always the relation of the observer to the world of his sense experience, and frequently landscapes and objects have human associations. The novelty advertised by the title A Peopled Landscape is, rather, that the human meaning is no longer an implication but in many of the poems an overt theme; the human figure moves to the centre and the physical or social context takes an ancillary position. This, of course, overstates the difference.