SOURCE: "Next Year's Words," in Poetry, Vol. 93, No. 5, February, 1959, pp. 335-40.

In the following review of Seeing is Believing, Kenner discusses the innovative nature and respect for tradition in Tomlinson's poetry and acknowledges his debt to William Wordsworth, Marianne Moore, and the Symbolist poets.

To be the best poet practicing in England is, these days, to share a meaningless eminence with the wittiest statistician in Terre Haute or the handsomest peacock ever hatched in Idaho. It is therefore virtually useless to locate Mr. Tomlinson with reference to his contemporaries; not only because he is steadily on the move and they aren't, but because he manifests just that unmistakable combination of radical originality and a sure impassioned civil intercourse with the past that marks off the poet of genius from the writers one merely places.

 The sea
Whether it is "wrinkled" and "crawls"
Or pounds, plunders, rounding
On itself...