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In this introductory chapter, Kirkham provides a biography of Charles Tomlinson’s early life to present day. It prepares the reader for the contents of the following chapters and foregrounds Tomlinson’s abilities and status as both a poet and a painter.

Chapter one provides a close examination and analysis of Tomlinson’s landscape poems, namely those found in The Way of a World, Seeing is Believing, Written on Water, A Peopled Landscape, American Scenes, Relations and Contraries, Collected Poems, The Necklace, and Mauberley. Kirkham focuses on the ways in which physical landscape in the poems is used in comparison to moral and mental landscapes, and foregrounds Tomlinson’s interest in sense experience.

Chapter six discusses new concerns and emphases emerging in the 1980s, whilst looking closely at Tomlinson’s poetic performance during the 80s. The chapter seeks to provide some conclusions about the character of his art and make a note of the building sense of relaxation in Tomlinson’s later poetry.

Like the chapter before it, chapter four tracks the development of Tomlinson’s poetry over the latter part of the 20^th century. Again, this chapter analyses the human scene and natural landscape in Tomlinson’s ‘human poems’, whilst also adopting a historical approach.

Chapter two explores the natural-human world and the sensory and mental experience, aesthetic and moral values in Tomlinson’s poetry and attempts to define the relationship between ‘nature poems’ and ‘human poems’. The chapter looks closely at ‘The Atlantic’ from Seeing is Believing in order to understand the boundaries between the natural world and the human world.

Chapter three traces a historical progression of Tomlinson’s poetry, focusing closely on the distinction between his ‘nature poems’ and ‘human poems’ published during the twenty year period 1958-1966. The chapter discusses the treatment of human experience within natural landscape and describes the ways in which the two genres of human and nature poetry can exist both separately and in unison.

Metamorphosis is an obvious metaphor for translation. But in fact it is so multifarious that translators have generally eschewed it. Nevertheless, Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses (1567) fleetingly adopts particular metamorphoses as metaphors for its own behaviour: it echoes Echo, interprets Deucalion's interpretation of an oracle, and so on. In this, it anticipates the more disciplined and extensive metaphors of translation that I have explored in the bulk of the book. Yet, to interpret a metamorphosis as the embodiment of a metaphor is to simplify it; to interpret a translation as the embodiment of a metaphor is a simplification too. Golding's Ovid vividly exemplifies what is true of all the translations I have discussed: the imaginative work done by a poem‐translation will always exceed the explanatory categories that are brought to bear on it—even the comparatively nuanced and complex metaphorical categories which I have proposed.

Chapter five begins by providing a brief chronological account of Tomlinson’s poetry published in the 1950s and 1960s, in which Kirkham recalls the literary qualities and aspects discussed earlier in previous chapters. The chapter then goes on to explore the ways of viewing poetry of the 1970s and 1980s as an entity.

This chapter considers the attacks against Alvarez's extremism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles Tomlinson's ‘Against Extremity’, from his 1969 collection The Way of the World, was particularly outspoken and unpleasant, referring to how ‘That girl’ who nearly took her own life before writing a book. Roy Fisher, a late modernist poet also declared: ‘The poets are dying because they have been told to die’. The fiercest and most comprehensive sally came from a bright young Scottish academic named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who inveighed against: the suicide merchants who say in effect, ‘no one can become a great poet unless he has at least tried killing himself’. The chapter goes on to discuss the similarities between Sylvia Plath and Forrest-Thomson, as well as the latter's poetry.

World War I, with its attendant music and noise, was followed immediately by an influenza epidemic (the “Spanish flu”) that was met by a resounding silence. To meet the epidemic, theatres closed and gatherings were prohibited; Western culture itself paused until the danger passed. Realistic portrayals and responses through music were rare (in contrast to the war), but they may be detectable in works by artists as diverse as Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Blind Willie Johnson. The nationalism of the conflict yielded to a new transnationalism, neither peaceful nor stable, described most memorably by Randolph Bourne, himself a victim of the disease.

This chapter considers the attacks against Alvarez's extremism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles Tomlinson's ‘Against Extremity’, from his 1969 collection The Way of the World, was particularly outspoken and unpleasant, referring to how ‘That girl’ who nearly took her own life before writing a book. Roy Fisher, a late modernist poet also declared: ‘The poets are dying because they have been told to die’. The fiercest and most comprehensive sally came from a bright young Scottish academic named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who inveighed against: the suicide merchants who say in effect, ‘no one can become a great poet unless he has at least tried killing himself’. The chapter goes on to discuss the similarities between Sylvia Plath and Forrest-Thomson, as well as the latter's poetry.