To his undergraduate students at Bristol in the 1960s, Charles Tomlinson was that rare thing, an acute literary critic who was also a working poet and a consummate practitioner of his art.
In a School of English where doctrinaire, Leavisite attitudes still led to battles over critical orthodoxy, Tomlinson’s lectures on 20th-century poetry simply illuminated his subject. The revolution brought to English verse by – as he put it – “two Americans and an Irishman”, with Eliot, Pound and Yeats in mind, came alive through his readings and commentary, and he epitomised for many of us the clarity, intellectual sharpness and telling humour of the best kind of university teacher.
His verse, combining a wide, international cultural perspective with the closest verbal precision, seemed just to demonstrate what poetry could be. This “major English modernist”, as Michael Schmidt describes him, was also a major teacher of English, his “passionate intellect” expressed both through his art and through his generously shared critical insights.
