SOURCE: "Process and Closure in Tomlinson's Prose Poems," in Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist, edited by Kathleen O'Gorman, University of Missouri Press, 1988, pp. 125-34.

In the following essay, Wesling analyzes Tomlinson's experiments with the prose poem, maintaining that they "must serve in the end to reinforce one's belief that he is after all a traditional poet."

The prose poem has not been favored by English poets, perhaps because of the prestige and unquestioned greatness of their national tradition of line and rhyme. Those who with Charles Tomlinson have experimented with the prose poem, like Roy Fisher and Geoffrey Hill, have been a shade more internationalist in outlook, open to certain formal possibilities from France and America. Tomlinson himself has written only eight prose poems, all of them grouped in the section called "Processes" in The Way of a World (1969). The longish and very fine text titled "Prose Poem...