SOURCE: "Observation Plus," in Encounter, Vol. XXXV, No. 6, December, 1970, pp. 72-4.

In the following excerpt, Hayman provides a positive assessment of The Way of a World.

Though American critics have recognised the importance of Charles Tomlinson's achievement, it is still generally underrated in this country and almost without exception, reviews of his new book The Way of a World have been condescending, if not unfavourable. Just as an actor gets type-cast, a poet in our literary climate is all too liable to go on being discussed in the same terms that are applied to him in his first set of reviews. "Painterly," "visual," "microscopic"—the words were relevant to Tomlinson's 1955 collection The Necklace, but while he is no less precise an observer than he was, he has developed so much since then that to go on thudding out the same adjectives is to tell a small part of...