Charles Tomlinson’s poetic career has been an odd one. Born in England in 1927, Tomlinson belongs to the generation of poets whose sympathies are presumed to lie with the movement known—in an aptly prosaic way—as the Movement. These poets, who emerged in the 1950s and had Philip Larkin as their unofficial leader, spurned the modernism and experimentalism that in their view had ruined poetry, especially in the United States. The Movement poets espoused not just traditional techniques like meter and rhyme but a worldview that its detractors deemed insular and provincial: Little England–ism at its worst. Although Tomlinson was born in the right decade, he was never Movement material. While the formal caliber of his poetry always has been as high as that of his Movement counterparts, his models were more international than national: William Carlos Williams, Charles Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, and, from a later generation, Robert Creeley and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. So isolated was Tomlinson that for some years he could not pursue a career in England, and pondered leaving. He didn’t, and the hostile setting did nothing to stop his writing. The Door in the Wall is his thirteenth book of original poems.

As the above names suggest, Tomlinson’s affinities lie with the group of poets known as the Objectivists.

As the above names suggest, Tomlinson’s affinities lie with the group of poets known as the Objectivists. In the work of these (mostly American) poets, the objects of reality are used not as