Why read C. H. Sisson?
Something a bit different this time — this longer-than-usual post, on the British poet C. H. Sisson (2014-2003), is drawn from the introduction John Talbot and I wrote for our recent edited collection, C. H. Sisson Reconsidered. The book was published earlier this year (you can buy it here) but it is horribly expensive and realistically, we are aware, only accessible to those who can use a university library. But Sisson is rarely taught and has not attracted a great deal of academic attention: our impression is that many of his remaining readers and admirers do not work in universities, but might find their way to a post like this. John is not on Substack but he is on Twitter (@JohnTal54272561). Do please share and forward with anyone you know who might be interested.
In our introduction we tried to set out what we find compelling about Sisson, to give a sense of the attractions of his voice and the shape of his achievement and, in particular, some of the areas where we felt that achievement has been underappreciated. If you are new to Sisson, there is an introduction to his work on his Poetry Archive page, with recordings (and texts) of several poems mentioned in this essay.
Only a relatively small number of contemporary readers are familiar with the work of C. H. Sisson (1914-2003) and he is in danger of being remembered chiefly as a notable translator of classical and European verse. Our book was intended in part as an intervention on behalf of Sisson as a poet in his own right. Above all, we were motivated to undertake the project, and see it through to completion, by the quality of Sisson’s work, in prose as well as poetry: Sisson was a fine (and often very funny, if rather unsparing) writer of prose, and he was, we believe, a very significant poet – more so, in fact, in his ‘original’ poetry than in the large quantity of mostly commissioned translations for which he is generally known (if at all) today. At their best, his ‘original’ poems, in voice, technique, and outlook, are unique among modernist verse. His religious poems are among the best in the whole English tradition. We believe that his work deserves new readers, and that existing readers could be helped to appreciate both the scope and the coherence of his achievement, and to explore new aspects of it, by a dedicated collection of critical essays.
There are many particular pleasures to reading Sisson: the pleasure of uncompromisingness, in style, tone and content, is perhaps one of the most obvious to anyone who turns to him for the first time, especially to the prose. His brief essays on the practice of translation, for instance, originally written as introductions, work well as readings for undergraduates considering the theory and practice of literary translation for the first time. Sisson’s prose is deceptively easy to read, clear to follow, sophisticated without ever being pretentious, and he says exactly what he means.
But Sisson’s work also affords many less immediately obvious rewards. Read over time, and across genres, his idiosyncratic voice – easily recognised in its distinctive turns of phrase, rhythms, syntax and even punctuation – conveys a sense of a coherent and specific personality whom we encounter in all modes, moods and moments. We may not always like the person we encounter in this way, but the sense of a personal encounter is, we think, unusually marked: and unusually ironic, given Sisson’s own repeated scepticism, throughout his life, about the reality of individual ‘personhood’ at all.
Though without pretension, and with a sharp and often noticeable awareness of coming from a different kind of social and educational background from most of his literary contemporaries and juniors, Sisson seems to speak strangely from the centre of several different traditions at once: both classical and modernist; rooted in the English lyric tradition but also in European literature; shaped both by the baroque or metaphysical and by the Victorian; grounded in the non-literary professional world of government and the civil service as much as in the literary milieu. This feature of his work is no doubt partly an accident of his own historical moment and particular experiences, but it gives his work a depth and a range of perspectives which we consider unusual among poets and critics today.
Turning in particular to the poetry, we have noticed, as we developed this book, and read and re-read Sisson, aspects which we feel have been neglected in the appreciation of his work: firstly, the technical and formal variety of his poetry; secondly, his range of allusive reference; and thirdly, a sense of the evolution of his work and its most significant stages. We offer in this introduction some comments on these elements, picking up and expanding upon the perspectives made in the various individual essays.
Sisson was constantly experimenting with forms and metrical features – a restive formal creativity comparable to that of Horace, Herbert and Hardy. (Perhaps not coincidentally, three poets of demonstrable influence upon him.) This is true even within poems, as well as between them: the ‘Letter to John Donne’ for instance, one of the best known and most frequently quoted of Sisson’s poems (you can hear or read it here), is written in seven six-line stanzas of very varying syllable count, in which a dominant pattern of four-beat lines is freely variegated for emphasis and effect by some lines of three or five syllables. This basis in a four-beat line – though rendered by Sisson in a very wide variety of ways – is in fact typical of his work and a feature of his verse throughout his career.
Sisson’s technical achievements can make him challenging to read, especially compared, for instance, to a contemporary such as Larkin, whose poetry is highly metrically accomplished but almost never demanding of the reader in the same way. This feature is only increased by the restlessness of his invention: whereas in Geoffrey Hill’s late work, for instance, we find a series of repeated formal experiments, challenging in themselves but as it were fully ‘worked out’ over an entire sequence, there are relatively few such repeated experiments in Sisson, and where they do appear, they are frequently not grouped together. Indeed, we might feel that Sisson’s formal innovations may have had more impact, and been better noted, had he spent longer pursuing each one. Nevertheless, the “difficulty” of Sisson can easily be overstated: many of his lyrics, especially in the later collections, are metrically and rhythmically straightforward.
Formally, Sisson’s work emerges from and as it were assumes a knowledge of the kind of range of literary forebears which that list – Horace, Herbert, Hardy – suggests. And it does so especially in relation to metre and sound: to hear the music of Sisson’s poetry, the reader must be a more than averagely experienced reader of other poetry. This point is related to, though distinct from, the rich allusiveness of Sisson’s verse. This is a feature of his work which has not attracted much critical attention, though the allusions are very wide-ranging both in source and type – from the borrowing of specific verse forms (from Herbert, for instance) to the widespread echoes of major Victorian poets, especially Tennyson, Hardy and Hopkins. The Victorian influences upon Sisson’s work have attracted particularly little comment – perhaps because they were considered common currency, and as such more or less obvious by his early readers and champions, but have become rapidly obscure for readers today. We hope that the essays in this volume offer starting points for readers in appreciating the wealth and depth of Sisson’s implicit reference, and the vistas upon his own work which this opens up.
Thirdly, we have been concerned in the writing and editing of this volume to offer a greater sense than we have found in criticism so far of the overall shape and achievement of Sisson’s work. The Sisson Reader and the Collected Poems are likely to be where any new reader begins, and both are excellent.1 Such projects are also, however, necessarily selective and the process of such selection tends both to reflect the personal preferences of editors and, in particular, to limit the reader’s ability to appreciate the strength and unity of individual collections. This is particularly the case in relation to collections which are relatively underrepresented in these selections: Metamorphoses (1968) is represented by only six poems in the Reader, including only one example (‘The Person’) of what is in fact a sequence of poems in that volume and others of this period written in forms deriving from Herbert. As a result, that particular formal and allusive voice, which is in our view an especially rich and provocative element of Metamorphoses, standing as it does alongside sharply modern notes, has partly disappeared from critical view. Indeed, several of the essays in the book point to the late 60s and early 70s as a crucial watershed in Sisson’s work.2
Sisson’s readers today
Sisson’s work retains two main if modest groups of followers: admirers, mostly classicists, of his large volume of verse translations, including of Horace, Lucretius, Virgil and Dante, many of which were reprinted in the Collected Translations; and those who continue to read and appreciate his ‘original’ poetry and critical writing, augmented in recent years by the Reader and Selected Poems. Our book, with its now rather distant origins in an enjoyable small conference held in 2017, seeks to address both these groups; to encourage those who only know one ‘aspect’ of Sisson’s work to explore others, and the links between them; and perhaps even to invite some new readers. In commissioning essays for the volume, we tried to be mindful of the full range of Sisson’s achievement, and to view it as a whole, by suggesting and encouraging connections between aspects of his work in individual essays as well as in the overview offered in this introduction.
Ours is the first volume of critical essays dedicated to Sisson, though his poetry, in particular, has received thoughtful treatment in essays printed in two recent journal issues and also in a section of Natalie Pollard’s monograph Speaking to You (alongside W. S. Graham, Geoffrey Hill and Don Paterson), as well as in several earlier essays and reviews, most notably by the poet and critic Donald Davie.3 Sisson also left many statements of his own poetic practice and concerns, both explicitly and implicitly, in essays on the poetry of others. The essays of C. H. Sisson Reconsidered respond to and build upon all these sources, while also, in some instances, challenging earlier readings. In particular, we tried to include pieces which shed light upon, or draw attention to, aspects of Sisson’s achievement which seemed to us to have been less well represented in existing criticism, including his translations from German as well as Latin, Greek and Italian; the particular qualities of his religious poetry; and his technical achievements, especially in metre.4
Sisson was a political writer, not only in many occasional essays but also in his verse, though the flavour of his politics can be hard to place for readers approaching him for the first time today. By political, we mean not so much that he reacted to “issues” of the day, but that strongly-held beliefs about the relationship between church, state, monarch and the individual were unusually central to his creative as well as his ‘public’ persona. Sisson was occupied at various times with the role of the established church: since this concern may now seem particularly recondite, the volume includes a specially commissioned chapter (Chapter 7) which, unlike the others, focuses not so much on Sisson’s literary achievement as on setting this aspect of his life and beliefs into its historical context. We are very grateful to Peter Webster for producing such a clear, judicious and enlightening account at a relatively late stage in the volume’s development.
About one of his favourite writers, the Roman poet Horace, Sisson wrote that he was ‘a poet invaluable in our time, not least because of his lack of sympathy with current prejudices’. His value for us is similar. He was — to borrow from a poem of Ezra Pound’s he much admired — ‘out of key with his time’, refusing to supply ‘what the age demanded’. Hannah Crawforth (Chapter 4) explores this theme directly, while many other chapters touch upon Sisson’s political commitments broadly understood. Such self-declared ‘anachronism’ is not in itself remarkable: for every writer seeking to embody the spirit of the times, there’s another striking a posture of fashionable ‘resistance’. Sisson himself sometimes makes too much of his unfashionableness. On the whole, though, his writing holds out an alternative to the broad liberal consensus of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His position can be called ‘conservative’, but that term must be immediately qualified. His bracing lack of sympathy extends also to the prejudices of ‘conservatives’, as generally understood in their various forms since the end of the second world war.
Sisson wrote a very large quantity of verse translation, especially – though not only – of classical authors; several of these have been reprinted much more frequently than any other of his work, and as a result many readers today know Sisson, as noted above, only as a translator of the classics. We seek to redress this imbalance: we feel that his many translations, valuable as they are in themselves, are best appreciated as part of the ground out of which grew his more fully-realized poems. Sisson’s pervasive Englishness is not Larkin’s insular little-England kind; it is deeply European. His Christianity is inextricable from his classical roots, and his most successful translations are not those, like his full versions of The Aeneid or The Divine Comedy, which can safely be classed as straightforward translations for marketing purposes. Instead they are those ambiguous forms of ‘translation’, paraphrase and response – from Horace and perhaps especially from Virgil – in which the ancient Roman sources become occasions of subtle, and usually explicitly Christian meditation. Translation for Sisson was by no means a side-line or hobby: in translating Sisson did intellectual and technical work central to his poetry. But in the end the translations are subordinate to the poetry, and it is as a distinctive poet, not as an honourable footnote in the history of literary translation, that Sisson deserves to be remembered.
We are not of course suggesting that Sisson’s work is without flaws, or that his poetic voice is always attractive. That voice sometimes becomes mannered or glib – especially in some of the essays and reviews which he wrote on request, though also occasionally in his verse. The repeated pose of peculiar unfashionability can be annoying and overstated: certainly, he sometimes claimed or implied to be more eccentric than he was in his tastes and influences. His persona could be sour, peevish or grumpy: sometimes to great effect – that sense of encountering a person ‘in the whole’, in all moods – but sometimes to the detriment of the work itself. Several of his views seem bigoted today: perhaps especially in what he implies about his experience in India, a question tackled sensitively by Henry King in his essay on that period of Sisson’s life (Chapter 8). As Natalie Pollard has shown, there is strikingly little direct address in his poetry – little sense of another person to whom he is speaking (though the same criticism cannot we think be made of most of the prose). Almost all the women who appear in his poetry are either erotic objects or vague almost to the point of disappearance. All this is we suppose to say no more than that Sisson’s authorial persona is not always likable; some readers may find his disinterest in this regard refreshing in itself.
Perhaps more significant is the question of style and influence. A few poems and other parts of poems can feel like modernism on ‘auto-pilot’; the restless formal experiment which we find so exhilarating in his work can sometimes be frustrating: one feels he doesn’t always see these experiments through, did not edit enough or push the idea to a conclusion. And it is certainly true that there is no ‘school’ of Sisson, no group of younger poets who wrote consciously in imitation of him. His enormous talent was somehow not decisive: we might say that his poetry, for all its innovation, failed to ‘change the weather’ as Hill, for instance, did, even where Hill is in fact derivative of Sisson. All the same, there is something peculiar about Sisson’s status: Nick Lowe (in Chapter 2) points out that the Everyman edition of Sisson’s translation of the Aeneid includes author biographies for Virgil and for Denis Feeney, who wrote an introduction, but not for Sisson, who is not mentioned at all aside from having his name on the text. He considers this an example of ‘the cultural amnesia surrounding Sisson’.
Allusion and influence
The importance of classical poets for Sisson has been often noted and is well evidenced also in our volume (Chapters 1, 2 and 6 in particular). His strong sense of identification with modernism has also been frequently remarked upon, including by Sisson himself, who recounted his formative encounter with Pound on more than one occasion. Our sense is that there has been less attention paid, however, to the formal and allusive links between his poetry and that of the English verse tradition prior to modernism.
Though Sisson barely mentions George Herbert (preferring to cite Vaughan, given his geographical proximity to the landscape of the Usk valley), Vaughan was himself, of course, a close imitator of Herbert and there is an extended cluster of poems, printed mainly in Metamorphoses (1968) and In the Trojan Ditch (1974), which demonstrate Sisson’s engagement with forms derived primarily from Herbert.5 It is unsurprising, of course, that he should have revisited this generation of poets as he grappled with his own understanding of Anglicanism, and of the political significance of the established church. The stanza form of the excellent lyric ‘The Person’ (discussed briefly in Chapter 10) is the same as that used in Sisson’s strange long poem ‘The Discarnation’ (first published as a pamphlet in 1967, then again in In the Trojan Ditch (1974)). Indeed, the Herbertian lyric form is part of the strangeness and almost the aggressiveness of that poem, since Herbert himself never extended lyric forms of this kind to such a length. Even late in his life, Sisson was still thinking on occasion in these formal and allusive terms: the poem ‘Steps to the Temple’, printed in What and Who (1994), borrows the title from Richard Crashaw’s 1646 collection of homage to Herbert’s Temple (1633):
What is belief? A recognition?Who knows of what? If any sayHe knows, he lies.Who knows what never was begunAnd will not end? God is a way,And a surprise.(1-6)
Many of Sisson’s earlier “metaphysical” poems of this type seem to be arguing with Herbert as much as they are imitating him. ‘The Rope’, for instance (which you can hear and read here), is unmistakably Herbertian in form and theme – one thinks especially of Herbert’s ‘The Pulley’ and ‘The Pearl’:
The RopeNow money is the first of thingsAnd after that the human heartWhich beats the time it can afford.What springsOf passion, what a smartAppearance, Lord!And are these spiritual things?They are. And we that are withoutHave failed to use the currencyCorrectly. For we have allowedA doubtAbout the things we seeTo sing aloudAnd put our calculations out.If the external is the hopeWe have here, as I think it is,We should respect it till we die.The slopeIs steep, the precipiceIs near. And INow know that money is the rope.
This is both a formal homage to Herbert and also quite a sharp reproach to him – or perhaps not so much Herbert himself as to the cult of the unworldly religious poet, his mind on higher things, and the (in current terms) economic “privilege” that this conceals. In that sense this is a poem about class; about having to work in some more or less respectable way to survive in society; about the nearness of poverty. A poem on the Roman poet Horace is about the same thing:
The mind you made, Horace, against all endeavoursOf Time and, as you hoped, in forgetfulnessOf poverty [. . .](‘Horace’, 1-3)
Sisson’s poem on Horace links the extraordinary restraint and control of Horatian verse to Horace’s biographical experience rooted in class – he depicts Horace (like himself) as a lower-middle-class, barely-respectable boy who has managed to climb high and clings on by keeping quiet:
A social success, pretending not to noticeThe licence which lay at the heart of the orgies;If the heart has longing in itIt is better never to speak of it.Is that the secret of your concentration,Necessary to outlive the centuries?My living has come too hard;Teach me therefore you rentier muse.(‘Horace’, 25-32)
Sisson was certainly influenced by, and alluded to, classical, Renaissance and early modern poets writing in Latin, Italian, French and German as well as English. The critical interest in these aspects of his work no doubt also reflects the preferences and backgrounds of his most attentive readers. But the breadth of his reading and his aural memory is everywhere evident in his poetry, and – perhaps unsurprisingly given his generation – echoes of Victorian poets are particularly audible throughout his work.
The lush aural beauty and mythologising of some of Sisson’s middle-period verse, such as ‘In insula Avalonia’, echoes Tennyson both stylistically and thematically, whereas ‘Burrington Combe’ (from Exactions (1980) is strongly reminiscent of Hardy. This is noticeably true of the end of the poem, but also in several minor stylistic features (e.g. ‘and so speak I’ (4)). ‘Blackdown’ (written in the early 1980s) recalls the emotional force of Hardy’s 1912 poems and combines it with the mythic or generalising power of the courting couple from Hardy’s ‘In the Time of the Breaking of the Nations’ – except that the couple in Sisson’s poem, both blurred by distance and with a mythic exemplarity, are he and his wife. The last poem in the Collected Poems, ‘Finale’, is likewise rooted in Hardy: here the broken lyre (‘A tuneless thing I am, / A broken lyre’, 5-6) recalls Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’ (though without its lyric hopefulness) and the last lines of ‘Finale’ echo Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’, both poems to which Sisson’s verse often seems to recur.
Sisson’s metre
Sisson’s metrics have often been considered unusually difficult, even intractable, and their irregularities have been described as typically modernist. Sisson himself, however, wrote straightforwardly about his understanding of poetry based not in the ‘rules’ of metre (“no more than an abstraction”), but in rhythm. His extensive comments on form rarely use the term ‘metre’ at all, but refer repeatedly to rhythm. He admired the “masterly dawdlings, hurryings, alterations of pace” of Eliot at the start of The Waste Land but also the “hesitations, sudden speeds, and pauses which are almost silences” of Hardy, and the juxtaposition is telling. Indeed, Sisson’s metrical dexterity has as much, if not a good deal more, in common with the masters of Victorian verse than it does with high modernism: Hardy’s metrical invention is notorious, but as familiar a poem as Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, for instance, employs metrical techniques, based on the variation of an established rhythmic structure, very similar to many of Sisson’s most-admired poems, including poems such as ‘The Red Admiral’ which have been described by some critics as particularly metrically intractable.
‘Dover Beach’ begins by establishing an iambic rhythm, but is not consistently iambic, and nor is it in pentameter: the lines of the poem range from four to 11 syllables, and from two stresses (‘The Sea of Faith’, 21) to five, though the most common measure is four (‘With tremulous cadence slow, and bring / The eternal note of sadness in’, 13-14). Indeed, the metrical technique as a whole – the way in which the poem is shadowed by an iambic pentameter form from which it has mostly fallen away – reflects the meaning. Nevertheless, ‘Dover Beach’ is easy to hear and indeed to remember.
Sisson could and certainly did produce verse in straightforward iambic pentameters such as, for instance, the latter two sections of ‘Somerton Moor’. On the whole, though, Sisson’s verse is characterized by his evasion of this form. The four-beat line, standard in oral forms such as ballads, nursery-rhymes and hymns, was natural to Sisson and it is the rhythm to which his verse recurs most frequently. This is true even when (as often) his lines tend towards ten syllables, and in this way give a visual impression of pentameter on the page. Indeed, although the metaphysical stanza forms of his mid-career verse (such as ‘The Discarnation’) look, on the page, far removed from the varied line lengths and lack of stanzaic regularity in a poem like ‘The Usk’ (from In the Trojan Ditch (1974)) or ‘Sillans-la-Cascade’ (from Anchises (1976)), and both of these are significantly different, again, from the much-quoted ‘Catullus’ (first published in 1964), all of these poems are built around a four-stress line and most frequently revert to this measure.
In ‘The Discarnation’, as in most of the other poems in Sisson’s metaphysical style, that four-beat line is also iambic: “How came the mind to be that shape” (133). ‘The Usk’, by contrast (which you can hear and read here) is certainly not iambic, but still establishes an audible, though frequently varied, four-beat pattern.
‘Catullus’, one of the most widely quoted of Sisson’s poems, originally opened Sisson’s volume of Catullan translations published in 1964. It too is built around a four-stress line (“Catullus walked in the Campus Martius”, 1), varied by lines with five (3, 9, 12, 16, 17, 21, 26). An analysis of the closing movement of the poem shows how the five-stress lines emphasise the irruption of Christ into the classical world, figured as a disruption:
He had already hovered his thirty yearsOn the edge of the Mediterranean basin.The other, rising like a whirlwind in a remote province,Was of a character he would have ignored.And yet the body burnt out by lechery,Turning to its tomb, was awaiting this,Forerunning as surely as John the BaptistAn impossible love pincered from a human form.
The final line of two-line coda (originally printed separately at the end of the volume of translations) is perhaps most naturally spoken with six rather than five stresses. The emphatic collection of stresses at the end of the line (and the poem), however, is rhetorically effective, and indeed Sisson quite often placed a sequence of consecutive stresses of this kind to create a closural cadence:
Catullus my friend across twenty centuriesAnxious to complete your lechery before Christ came.
As we saw above in ‘The Discarnation’, Sisson had been writing more and less conventionally metrical poems on an iambic base alongside, or in alternation with, non-iambic poems for some time. If we go further back, however, to his first collection, The London Zoo (1961), we no longer find poems in the kind of elaborately rhymed stanzas typical of his ‘metaphysical’ phase, while we still find poems that exhibit his characteristically flexible metrics, based upon rhythm rather than ‘metre’ formally understood. An example is the poem ‘Money’, also with a regular four stresses to a line, with its memorable opening: ‘I was led into captivity by the bitch business’. Even late in his career, Sisson stayed true to the four-beat line: it is particularly obvious in the collection What and Who (1994).
Indeed, most of Sisson’s rhythmically “difficult” poems make use of this kind of rhythmic variation: establishing a general pattern of a certain number of stresses, though frequently varying it for musical, emotive and rhetorical effect, while remaining visually and syllabically in contact with the patterns of iambic pentameter. Among many possible examples is one of Sisson’s best-known poems, ‘A Letter to John Donne’ (first published in Numbers (1965) — you can read and hear it here), a poem in seven six-line stanzas of very varying syllable count, in which a dominant pattern of four-beat lines is freely variegated by some with only three and some with five:
What makes you familiar is this dual obsession;Lust is not what the rutting stag knowsIt is to take Eve’s apple and to loseThe stag’s paradisal look:The love of God comes readilyTo those who have most need.(19-24)Come down and speak to the men of abilityOn the Sevenoaks platform and tell themThat at your Saint Nicholas the faithIs not exclusive in the fools it choosesThat the vain, the ambitious and the highly sexedAre the natural prey of the incarnate Christ.(37-42, final lines)
Landscape
Sisson is a great poet of ‘place’ and ‘A Letter to John Donne’ is set, quite distinctively, in one of those places: the suburban commuter-belt around London. Broadly three ‘places’ are important in Sisson, in roughly ascending order: London; the suburbia inhabited by the men on the platform at Sevenoaks; and the West Country. London features almost exclusively in his earliest poems, most often as a site of cupidity (e.g. ‘Sparrows Seen from the Office Window’), lechery (‘On the Way Home’), or political incompetence of the kind he saw at first hand from his position at the heart of Whitehall. London is the occasion too for Sisson’s most overtly satirical poems, such as the Swiftian metropolitan panorama ‘The London Zoo’. Historical (as against contemporary) London is only rarely presented reverently, as in ‘Carmen Saeculare,’ with its solemn reference to the crown jewels in the Tower. Its picture of London’s suffering (the drug-addicts, the ‘drifting’ figures) is for once tender rather than caustic, but even that poem stresses the contrast of a wholesome and restorative ‘wind from the west country’.
Sisson commuted into London from Sevenoaks, whose proximity to the metropolis creates a tension to which he was keenly attuned. Nearby Knole Park is populated with ‘paradisal stags’ in a bucolic landscape (‘Knole’) a little incongruous with the Sevenoaks railway platform where crudely ambitious ‘men of ability’ daily depart for and arrive from London (‘Letter to John Donne’). Sisson’s feel for the liminal character of the commuter-belt produced poems that mediate between the London he disliked and the proper countryside he loved.
The landscape evoked most frequently his work is that of the West Country (including neighbouring parts of Wales) and in particular the Somerset Levels, where in retirement he produced the bulk of his work. There he finds his proper place: after the disappointments of youth and the vanity of middle-aged ambition, ‘late in time and after all deceits / I came to stand beside Broadmead Brook / As in the very hollow of my hand’ (‘Broadmead Brook’). This perfect fit between the poet and his landscape issues in a striking correspondence between the contours of the land and his own consciousness, as in his precise observations of the ripples on the surface of the River Usk:
Nothing is in my own voice because I have notAny. Nothing in my own nameHere inscribed on water, nothing but flowA ripple, outwards. Standing beside the UskYou flow like truth, river, I will get inOver me, through me perhaps, river let me be crystallineAs I shall not be(‘The Usk’)
Sisson’s apprehension of the countryside is in the Tennysonian rather than the Wordsworthian tradition. His landscapes are charged with a numinousness approaching mysticism, especially when, as often, they are haunted with Arthurian associations (‘In Insula Avalonia,’ ‘In Flood’). As few poets ever have, he conveys the lay of the land aurally as much as visually, as in the lushly-vowelled soundscapes of ‘Somerton Moor’ (‘Under the peat, dark mystery of earth, / Fire of the hearth, enchanter of my heart’) or ‘In Flood’ where, looking out over the flooded Levels, Sisson recalls a phrase of Sir Thomas Mallory’s which ‘breathes still upon the ripple / Which is inummerable’. For all his emulation of the modernists, in his treatment of place and landscape Sisson speaks from the heart of the English tradition that includes his fellow West Countrymen Henry Vaughan, William Barnes and Thomas Hardy.
If early modern and Victorian poets were as much of an influence upon Sisson’s formal dexterity as modernism, the same is very much true of the distinctive role of ‘place’ in his work. Indeed, ‘place’ is almost everything in Sisson’s poetry. The only other major presences are ‘I’ and ‘God’, but while these last two, though pervasive, are flickeringly elusive, insubstantial, and prone to scepticism, the landscape, especially of south-west England, is unambiguously there and moreoever promises, in Sisson, to endure. In many of the poems ‘I’ is almost co-extensive with the landscape, so those two elements merge. Maybe in some cases both ‘I’ and ‘God’ combine with the landscape. Place – especially his chosen place in the west country – anchors and embodies his two other preoccupations and often seems to function almost as a site of belief. It would be an overstatement, but maybe a productive one, to propose that Sisson’s poetry can be broadly understood as about England; he quotes Gower, ‘O gentile Engleterre, a toi j’escrits’, as if programmatically, on the last page of the 1984 Collected, and certainly all of his most romantic statements are set firmly in an English landscape: ‘The rabbits and the partridges, and all / Who dare to dream, and be, of England still’ (‘Broadmead Brook’, closing lines).
C. H. Sisson, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1998); Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness, eds, A C. H. Sisson Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 2014).
Especially Charlie Louth (Chapter 1) on Sisson’s version of Aeneid VI in ‘The Descent’ (published in In the Trojan Ditch, 1974); John Talbot (Chapter 6) on the political events of 1968 and their impact upon Sisson; and Victoria Moul (Chapter 10) on the formal and allusive developments visible in Metamorphoses (1968) and ‘The Discarnation’ (first printed in 1967, then included in In the Trojan Ditch of 1974).
Sections dedicated to essays on Sisson in Agenda 45.2 (2010) and PN Review 217 (2014); Natalie Pollard, Speaking to You. Contemporary Poetry and Public Address (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Section II; Donald Davie, “C. H. Sisson’s Poetry,” in Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain, 1960-1988 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 109-12; Donald Davie, “An Appeal to Dryden,” review essay of Sisson, In the Trojan Ditch, Listener XCI, 2354 (9 May 1974): 603-4, reprinted in Donald Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum. Essays of Two Decades, ed. Barry Alpert (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1977), 271-4.
Kenneth Haynes considers Sisson’s German translations in Chapter 5; Chapter 10 (Victoria Moul) assesses his religious poetry. Sisson’s metrical qualities are discussed by several contributors to the book, including Charlie Louth (Chapter 1), John Talbot (Chapter 6), Victoria Moul (Chapter 10), and the second part of this introductory essay. In addition, we are delighted to be able to include a chapter on the rich archival material relating to his time in India (Chapter 8, by Henry King), and a personal reflection by his long-time friend and publisher, Michael Schmidt (Afterword).
From Metamorphoses examples include ‘The Rope’, ‘The Person’, ‘The Doll’, ‘The Critic’, and ‘The Spectre’; from In The Trojan Ditch, ‘Envy’, ‘Good Friday’ and ‘The Discarnation’.