[2] After attending Longton High School, Tomlinson read English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied with Donald Davie.
[3] Schmidt goes on to define the two characteristic voices of Tomlinson: "one is intellectual, meditative, feeling its way through ideas" while the other engages with "landscapes and images from the natural world".
[4] Tomlinson's poetry often circles around these themes of place and return, exploring his native landscape of Stoke and the shifting cityscape of modern Bristol.
Tomlinson was an authoritative translator of poetry from Russian, Spanish and Italian, including work by Antonio Machado, Fyodor Tyutchev, César Vallejo, and Attilio Bertolucci.
His poetry has been translated into Spanish by Jordi Doce and Octavio Paz, into Italian by Silvano Sabbadini, Edoardo Zuccato, and others, and into French by Michele Duclos.