“BETWEEN AN EDEN LOST AND PROMISED PARADISE”
“BETWEEN AN EDEN LOST AND PROMISED PARADISE”

Summary/Abstract: This essay analyses a number of poems by Charles Tomlinson (mostly ‘Italian’ pieces, included in his collection In Italia, Selection of Poems) conveying his ideas about the vices of modernity, the crisis of language and communication, but also about new ways of expression (the language of art and passion) passing through myth. My attention focuses mainly on the spaces (re)created by the poet in his work, surveying first of all the concept of “articulation” at the roots of his personal aesthetics: the articulation of an area, that is to say, the intimate creative and ‘geometrical’ negotiation of the individual with his/her environment, against the idea of “destruction” typical of modern aesthetics; and the articulation of the words in the communicative processes, because – as Tomlinson states – “our language is our land”. Each of the lyrics considered in this paper implies a myth (sometimes more than one) which the artist uses not only to establish a relationship between past and present, but also to illustrate how modern man lives in modern society. The author’s favourite setting to perform the contemporary drama of the loss of Eden and of a recovered Paradise is Rome. In the ‘Eternal City’ Tomlinson perceives, together with the “healing artifice”, the living signs of a mythological past. Rome appears to his eyes and his imagination like an “articulated” mixture of concrete and nature, new roads and ancient ruins where art and passion survive, thus he realizes that a renewal is possible in such a place, and that the interior Paradise-state – even though local and momentary – can be regained.

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