He is also a printmaker, collagist and musician. In the 1980 edition of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel he stated in the introduction (which comes at the end of the book) that the process of using words found only in the text of an obscure Victorian novel to create his work provided "the solution for this artist of the problem of wishing to write poetry while not in the real sense of the word being a poet..." This maturing into himself as a poet chimes with developments within poetry over this same period of time to allow for a confident reassessment of Tom Phillips the Poet.