The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson: Border Lines

by Saunders, Judith P.

• ISBN13: 9780838639764
• ISBN10: 0838639763
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-05-01
• Publisher: Associated Univ Pr

Summary

Throughout Charles Tomlinson's fifty-year career, borders have served him as setting, topic, theme, leitmotif, metaphor, and formal principle. Encompassing discussion of more than two hundred individual poems, this study offers a coherent framework for understanding the body of work created by a major, late twentieth-century poet. The borders he explores are spatial, temporal, perceptual, and ideological; thus they comprehend a wide range of concerns, from the ecological to the sociopolitical, the philosophical, the ethical, and the aesthetic. The poems focus on places, literal and figurative, where disparate realms converge, e.g., sites of political and cultural displacement, of theological or economic confrontation. Defining what lies on either side of a given boundary, Tomlinson's work invites a back-and-forth process of comparison and contrast; hence it fosters a dynamic and multifaceted awareness. A commitment to principles of juxtaposition and counterpoint influences the prosodical workings of the poetry as well, manifesting itself in structural patterns,

Author Biography

Judith P. Saunders earned her A.B. and M.A. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, her Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego. She is Professor of English at Marist College in New York State, where she teaches courses in American and English literature, with special emphasis on twentieth-century poetry

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	9	(2)
List of Abbreviations	11	(4)
Introduction	15	(4)
Elemental Demarcation	19	(22)
Cultural and Historical Boundaries	41	(28)
Contrapuntal Designs	69	(33)
Perceptual Boundaries	102	(23)
Graphic Framing	125	(23)
Contiguity and Conjunction	148	(24)
Notes	172	(15)
Works Cited	187	(5)
General Index	192	(2)
Index of Poems	194
Charles Tomlinson