He read English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied with Donald Davie. 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. He and his wife Brenda now live in a Cotswold cottage at Ozleworth, near Wotton-under-Edge. They met as teenagers, and have two daughters and a granddaughter. He was awarded a CBE by the Queen in 2002.

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.

His first book of poetry was published in 1951, and his Collected Poems was published by the Oxford University Press in 1985, followed by the Selected Poems: 1955-1997 in 1997. Since 2000 he has published two collections, Skywriting (2004) and Cracks in the Universe (2006), both published by Carcanet in their Oxford Poets series.

In 1991 he recorded all of his published poetry for Keele University. These include his Stoke-on-Trent poems, which are: At Stoke; The Slag Heap; Steel; Canal; Poem for My Father; John Maydew; The Hand at Callow Hill Farm; The Farmer's Wife; Black Brook; The Question; The Shaft; After a Death; Night Ride; Gladstone Street; Etruria Vale; Penkhull New Road; The Way In; The Tree; Midlands; Portrait of the Artist I; Portrait of the Artist II; The Hoard; Consolations for Double Bass; The Rich; Class; The Hawthorn in Trent Vale; Written on Water; The Marl Pits.

Charles Tomlinson 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 has collaborated with the Mexican writer Octavio Paz. He edited the Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation and the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams.

• O'Gorman, Kathleen. Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist. University of Missouri Press, 1988.

• Saunders, Judith P. The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson: Border Lines. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.

• Charles Tomlinson Reads His Stoke Poems, Keele University 1994. (Audio recordings of his poetry about Stoke-on-Trent).