Charles Tomlinson is the first poet to have learned a way of being distinctively English by mastering an idiom markedly international. Consequently he can write English, in England, as though it were a foreign tongue of amazing resources, at his thorough if somewhat wary command. (Flaubert had learned to write French in a similar spirit.) Stone and water are two of his archetypal images, and language, which can be like water (seductive, compenetrant, omniform), can also be like stone (obdurate, carvable, laudably other).

He connects "Little-Englandism" with "that suffocation which has affected so much English art ever since the death of Byron." One way to suffocate is to seal the doors and windows. For a long time, American literature was thought of, in both countries but especially in England, as English literature that by accident had been written somewhere else. Then if (like Leaves of Grass) it was...