SOURCE: “True Nature First Inspires the Man,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 21, 1994, pp. 22-3.

In the following review, Tomlinson discusses American poetry and offers a positive evaluation of The Columbia History of American Poetry.

“American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist.” This italicized passage (unattributed) appears in Book Three of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Williams having excerpted it from an article of George Barker’s published in Poetry London in 1948. Tackled almost twenty years later by Mike Weaver, then in the preliminary stages of his book on Williams’s American background, Barker cheerfully responded: “Certainly it is a remark that, in and out of my cups, I made several times too often in those days. Myself I don’t think it disputable that American poetry is beginning to happen now.”Beginning to happen? The year is...