Selected Poems of C.H. Sisson

C. H. Sisson

Among 20th-Century English poets, C. H. Sisson was a magnificent anachronism: a hard-working civil servant and a radical modernist, an Anglican and a savage critic of the contemporary church, a committed Englishman without a trace of atavism, a Johnsonian Tory remote from the economic priorities of the current Tory party, a major scholar and translator distrustful of the academy. In short, he ploughed a lonely furrow.

The Independent

Selected Poems of C.H. Sisson

Poetry by C. H. Sisson

C. H. Sisson’s Selected Poems presents a half century’s work by the writer deemed “England’s finest living poet” by the London Times. Sisson’s poems are characterized by a mastery of speech rhythms and imagery learned from Eliot, Pound, and T. E. Hulme. Serious and highly charged, they are steeped in literary tradition (Sisson is one of the great translators of Dante, Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil), and they draw on Sisson’s remarkable knowledge of history and culture. Starting with poems written on a troopship and ending on home ground in Somerset, England, Selected Poems provides a comprehensive selection of Sisson’s work, including “Tristan,” a sequence written in the poet’s eighty-first year.

Buy Selected Poems of C.H. Sisson

Paperback(published Jun, 01 1996)

ISBN
9780811213271
Price US
9.95
Page Count
96
Portrait of C. H. Sisson

C. H. Sisson

20th-century British poet, translator, essayist, and novelist

Among 20th-Century English poets, C. H. Sisson was a magnificent anachronism: a hard-working civil servant and a radical modernist, an Anglican and a savage critic of the contemporary church, a committed Englishman without a trace of atavism, a Johnsonian Tory remote from the economic priorities of the current Tory party, a major scholar and translator distrustful of the academy. In short, he ploughed a lonely furrow.

The Independent

His poems move in service of the loved landscapes of England and France; they sing (and growl) in love of argument, in love of seeing through, in love of the firm descriptions of moral self-disgust; they move in love of the old lost life by which the new is condemned.

Donald Hall, New York Review of Books