SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Autumn, 1975, pp. 405-16.

In the following interview, Tomlinson discusses the role of politics in his poetry, the language he utilizes in his verse, and the function of poetry in society.

[Mike Erwin]: In the Poem as Initiation you write, "there is no occasion too small for the poet's celebration—Williams' red wheelbarrow, or Wordsworth's 'naked table '—all ask, through the insistence of the poem's ritual celebration, to be recorded by us in their deeper significances. " Is this an archetypal reality, something touching on the primary basis of existence (whatever your sense of that is); or in other words, does the particular contain the general or does the particular exist primarily in its own "isolate intensity"?

[Charles Tomlinson]: In The Poem as Initiation, with twenty minutes or so in which to say my piece at the Phi Beta Kappa...