SOURCE: "A Creator of Space," in Poetry, Vol. 88, No. 5, August, 1956, pp. 324-28.

In the following review of The Necklace, Kenner differentiates Tomlinson's poetry from that of other contemporary English poets.

What claims to be the "agreeable minor verse" of anonymous British culture—the sort of thing for instance that gets printed for filler in The Listener—traffics, as the patient inspector quickly discovers, in void gestures of rumination over themes that, until the ruminative process seized on them, barely existed as themes. A thousand unpretentious poems are amplified samples of the background noise that continually accompanies the chatter of our mental processes, insistent, like all background noise, when the talking machine pauses for a moment: bits of commonplace assimilation of one's environment, isolated and promoted as "poetic" because not crassly practical. This random example comes from The Listener for October 13, 1955 [elisions Kenner's]:

This has a delectable post-Thermidor complacency...