Charles Tomlinson Letters (VMF170) | MSS Manuscripts

Tomlinson, Charles (1927-)

Alfred Charles Tomlinson (January 8, 1927 - ) is a British poet and translator, and also an academic and artist. Born and raised in Penkhull in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, Tomlinson attended Longton High School and Queens' College, Cambridge. After leaving university he spent a year in Liguria in Italy and then taught in a primary school. He later became Emeritus Professor of English Poetry at the University of Bristol, England. They met as teenagers, and have two daughters and a granddaughter.

Tomlinson's first book of poetry was published in 1951, and his Collected Poems was published in 1985, followed by the Selected Poems: 1955-1997 in 1997. He has excelled as an authoritative translator of poetry from the Russian, Spanish and Italian, including the work of Antonio Machado, Fyodor Tyutchev, César Vallejo and Attilio Bertolucci. He edited the seminal Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation and the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams. He is also an artist, and In Black and White: The Graphics of Charles Tomlinson, with an introduction by Nobel prize-winner Octavio Paz, was published in 1976.