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“... has yet to receive the attention he deserves. Large claims are made by some for the work of C.H. Sisson, who has become something of a cult figure and is clearly a force to be reckoned with. (Aside from a great deal of original poetry, he has published a book on The Spirit of British Administration and a recent translation of The Divine Comedy.) Are the ...”

“... one’s language, one’s cultural situation to give a full report. As the poem at the end of C.H. Sisson’s ‘partial autobiography’ says: To be on the outside and yet to speak Is not a thing the mind of man can compass. All autobiographies are partial, both because they cannot utter everything and because they cannot stand wholly outside their ...”

“... by his friends, and they are introduced, with a char acteristic touch of dry affection, by C.H. Sisson. More might have been said, I think, about Mairet’s draughtsmanship, which can be judged by his fine illustrations to Ashbee’s Modern English Silverwork. But Sisson presents him as a rare, even extraordinary human ...”

“... points de repère; over the years the poems of Christopher Middleton, of J.H. Prynne, and of C.H. Sisson, have all found themselves not so much constituting the grounds of Davie’s argument as figuring in it. But Milosz is too stubborn and faceted to be functionalised, even in the most high-minded way, and the result is a disinterested energy in Davie’s ...”

“... Times’), may have less to do with metrics than with a richness in and beyond the language. Sisson writes, ‘A heron rises,’ and because I, too, encounter herons on my local walks, I see at once the curiously beautiful drapery on the wings’ trailing edges, and the elegant languid lofting into the air – but I don’t see them in the poem. When Les ...”

“... be great, and mere industriousness could hardly keep him going. To judge by his introduction, C.H. Sisson is armed, if not with love for Dante, at least with great confidence in his own abilities. Dismissing the efforts of Binyon and Dorothy Sayers (‘it is not any language, though nearest, no doubt, to the quotha and forsooth of Victorian knightly ...”

“... is what we end on. Only in the great poets is content so intimately married to form. Finally, C.H. Sisson. A proper appreciation of Sisson’s Collected Poems must be left to others: my own admiration of his work is so amply documented that, were I now to embark on it afresh, my tribute would be discounted as predictably ...”

“... the people who are best at being filthy, performing filthiness rather than just being filthy. C.H. Sisson, in many respects a dry old stick as a translator, but whose painstakingness ensures that his translations always have the cleansing sting of a styptic pencil, has Catullus offer to do the sucking (‘All right I’ll bugger you and suck your ...”

“... So Geoffrey Hill comes to stand next to Shakespeare in the England of Plantagenet Kings. C.H. Sisson finds himself in the same company in the bracing reign of Henry VIII. Philip Larkin joins Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen for the final flowering of the Great War. Tom Paulin has denounced Mr Baker’s attempt to establish a single English tradition as the ...”

“... are also bibliographically useful, critically independent and sometimes funny (he describes C.H. Sisson as ‘an acquired taste’ who seems ‘inclined to warn off many who might acquire it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each seems to accept that for the first three decades a canon is already pretty much shaped. Partly this is ...”

“... living British poets (as an index of Perkins’s preferences, the other two are Thom Gunn and C.H. Sisson). In the opposing camp, Tom Paulin provoked an indignant response in this journal in 1985 when he indicted Hill for his reactionary and derivative ‘kitsch feudalism’. Hill’s admirers responded with extreme defensiveness, representing Paulin’s ...”

“... very well of The Marsden Case, and his admiration for The Rash Act has the notable support of C.H. Sisson, who says in his Introduction to the Carcanet edition (1982) that ‘it has a seriousness which goes further and deeper than that of the great tetralogy’ – that it is a technical masterpiece, exhibiting Ford’s remarkable powers in their ripest ...”

“... Rossetti’s attraction to death-in-life figures has preoccupied her biographers and critics. C.H. Sisson called her ‘in her sobriety … the most naked of poets’, and Rachel Mann’s introduction to this new selection adds that she writes in a ‘tantalising confessional mode’, but no one has ever been certain what life the poems were exposing. She had ...”

“... to imperial Rome, he had a point – polemical, and more than polemical: but now, when C.H. Sisson trots out the same Poundian trope, it is the merest whistling in the dark. The two halves of the American continent have begun speaking to each other; and in that dialogue the British voice cannot intervene except as a sterilising distraction. If that is ...”

“... in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, John Ciardi’s in 1955, Mark Musa’s in 1971, C.H. Sisson’s in 1980, not to mention an Inferno by assorted poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles Singleton, and an admirable translation – again in prose – by Robert Durling, which will be ...”