The preceding chapters offer a series of partial perspectives, in a sequence contrived to allow Tomlinson's poetry to unfold its ‘logic’, the principle of its coherence. The purpose of those chapters was expository; its pursuit would have been incompatible with a consistently historical treatment of this poet's work. The distinction between nature poem and human poem, having served its purpose, can now be dropped. Since this study has been, intentionally, sparing in its references to the later work, this chapter will explore ways of viewing the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s as an entity.

It goes without saying that the poems of the 1970s and 1980s built on foundations laid in the 1950s and 1960s. There are no clear historical divisions in Tomlinson's work. In the evolution of his poetry the later simply modifies and extends the earlier. As he said in an interview with Michael Schmidt in 1977, ‘the underlying continuity is the important thing’. Nevertheless, to characterize the later work, we need to take note of what differences do exist between that and the earlier; talk of modifications and extensions implies a particular conception of what has been modified and extended. A description of the second twenty years therefore requires, for comparison, a characterization of the first twenty—not, I should add, as a fixed thing but as a process of development. In this brief overview of the earlier work I shall be recalling qualities and aspects of the poetry discussed in the previous pages, but not hitherto related to period and viewed in a historical perspective.

Not counting Relations and Contraries (1951), which Tomlinson regards as prentice work, he published two collections in the 1950s, The Necklace in 1955 and Seeing is Believing in 1958 (reissued with additions in 1960). Early influences in the formation of his personal style were the clean line and phrasing of the American modernists, Pound, Stevens and Marianne Moore (William Carlos Williams made his mark later) and the reasoned structures, civilities and conceptual diction of the eighteenth-century English poets.