SOURCE: "In the Eden of Civility," in The Times Literary Supplement, December 1, 1978, p. 1406.

In the following favorable review of Selected Poems and The Shaft, Schmidt explores Tomlinson's rejection of both Neo-romantic and Movement poetry and discusses the ways this conscious rejection informs his own work.

In "Small Action Poem" (1966) Charles Tomlinson introduces Chopin "shaking music from the fingers". Chopin's art was second nature to him. Tomlinson is not that sort of artist, he is to an unusual degree fastidious. In The Shaft, his latest collection, there are poems which he characterizes as "bagatelles"—a genre he has frequently exploited, most memorably in American Scenes (1966) which gives the lie to those critics who dismiss him as "humourless". Tomlinson's humour is broad, short on fashionable local wit but rich in human observation. Yet the bagatelles are marginal in Tomlinson's work. At the centre is not anecdote but an acute perception...