'A Mediation on John Constable' - Charles Tomlinson and his poetical concept

Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: PS '20th century English poetry', language: English, abstract: If you look at a list showing the most important English poets in 20th century literature, Charles Tomlinson is often one of the persons you will miss, or at least, only find in the background. Instead, the list is fixed on poets like Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin or Seamus Heaney. This has got several reasons: it is not the fact that Charles Tomlinson has published only a few works, but it is the difficulty to put him and his poems in one category. Tomlinson, who has published since 1950 in each decade, has been influenced by the different conceptions about art throughout the years. The poem I want to analyse was written in 1953, at the beginning of Tomlinson’s writing, in a time, when English poetry was dominated by the realistic style of writing of the Movement poets. This poem deals about the English painter John Constable, who is famous for his landscape paintings and especially his cloud pictures. The poem is a good example to show Tomlinson’s position towards the term of “art” in general and his opinion about contemporary poetry. As he is today most famous for his poems about natural phenomena, this poem can be regarded as one of his most meaningful ones. The upcoming analysis should discuss this poem in order to its content, structure and style and should especially answer the question where in the 20thcentury Tomlinson and his concept of poetry should be integrated and where he stands for.