C. H. Sisson


Charles Hubert Sisson, CH, usually cited as C. H. Sisson, was an English poet, novelist, essayist, and translator.

Life

Charles Hubert Sisson was born on 22 April 1914 in Bristol, England. His parents were Richard Percy Sisson and Ellen Minnie Sisson. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly. He was educated at the University of Bristol where he read English and Philosophy. He continued his studies in France and Germany.
As a poet, he first came to light through the London Arts Review, X, founded by the painter Patrick Swift and the poet David Wright. He reacted against the prevailing intellectual climate of the 1930s, particularly the Auden Group, preferring to go back to the anti-Romantic T. E. Hulme, and to the Anglican tradition. The modernism of his poetry follows a 'distinct genealogy' from Hulme to Eliot, Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis. His novel Christopher Homm experiments with form and is told backwards.
Sisson entered the Ministry of Labour as Principal Assistant in 1936. During the Second World War, he served in the ranks of the British Army in India from 1942 to 1945. He was Simon Senior Research Fellow, Director of Establishments, Ministry of Labour, and Director of Occupational Safety and Health, Ministry of Employment. 1972 was also the year of his retirement from the Civil Service, with the rank of Under-Secretary. A standard text, The Spirit of British Administration, was the product of his Simon Senior Research Fellowship; it contains the main fruit of his reflection on the British Civil Service. The work notably compares British with French, German, Swedish, Austrian, and Spanish administrative methods; Sisson sees the British Civil Service as emerging favourably from the comparison. Only slight and negative mention is made of the United States. Sisson was no blind admirer of British methods, however. He was a 'severe critic of the British Civil Service and some of his essays caused controversy'. In his collection The London Zoo, he writes this epitaph: 'Here lies a civil servant. He was civil/ To everyone, and servant to the devil.'
Sisson was married, in 1937, to Nora Gilbertson and they had two daughters. In 1993, C. H. Sisson was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for his services to literature.
Sisson died on 5 September 2003.

Works

Poetry collections

  • Poems
  • The Spirit of British Administration
  • The London Zoo
  • Numbers
  • The Discarnation, or How the Flesh became Word and Dwelt Among Us
  • Metamorphoses,
  • Roman Poems
  • In the Trojan Ditch: Collected Poems and Selected Translations
  • The Corridor
  • Anchises
  • Moon-Rise and Other Poems
  • Exactions,
  • Autobiographical and other papers of Philip Mairet, editor
  • Modern Poets Five editor Jim Hunter, with Andrew Waterman, Craig Raine, Robert Wells, and Andrew Motion
  • Night Thoughts and Other Poems
  • Collected Poems 1943–1983
  • God Bless Karl Marx!
  • On the Lookout: A Partial Autobiography
  • Selected Poems
  • Nine Sonnets
  • Re-active Anthology: Ghosts in the Corridor No. 2 with Andrew Crozier and Donald Davie
  • The Pattern
  • What and Who
  • Poems: Selected
  • Collected Poems
  • ''Antidotes''

    Novels

  • An Asiatic Romance. A satirical novel 1953
  • ''Christopher Homm''

    Critical works (books)

  • Art and Action —literary theory, criticism
  • Case of Walter Bagehot
  • David Hume
  • Jonathan Swift: Selected Poems ed. C.H. Sisson, Carcanet Press, 1990
  • Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy ed. C.H. Sisson, Penguin English Library
  • The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays
  • PN Review 16 , Sisson, C H I A Richards, PN Review, Publication Date: 1980
  • Collected Poems and Plays, Lewis, Wyndham; Munton, Alan ; C.H. Sisson,
  • English Poetry, 1900–50, ed. C.H. Sisson
  • The Rash ACT, Ford, Ford Madox, ed. C.H. Sisson
  • The English Sermon
  • Anglican Essays
  • The English Novel Ford Madox Ford, ed. C.H. Sisson
  • A Call Ford Madox Ford, ed. C.H. Sisson
  • The Regrets, Joachim Du Bellay; Translator – C.H. Sisson,
  • Christina Rossetti : Selected Poems , Rossetti, Christina Georgina; Sisson, C. H.,
  • Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Ford Madox Ford, ed. C.H. Sisson
  • In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers
  • Selected Writings Jeremy Taylor, ed. C.H. Sisson
  • English Perspectives: Essays on Liberty and Government
  • Grand Street 45 , Cage; John; Gates, David; Duong Thu Huong; Richter, Gerhard; Sisson, C H
  • Is There a Church of England?
  • Poems and Essays on Poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, ed. C.H. Sisson.

    Translations

  • Versions and Perversions of Heine
  • The Poetry of Catullus, The Viking Press, New York, 1966
  • The Poetry of Catullus, MacGibbon and Kee, 1966
  • Lucretius: De Rerum Natura , Carcanet, Manchester, 1976
  • The Poetic Art, Horace
  • Some Tales of La Fontaine,
  • The Divine Comedy
  • Song of Roland
  • The Aeneid
  • Collected Translations
  • Britannicus, Phaedra, Athaliah by Jean Racine

    Letters

  • Letters to an Editor, ed. M. Fisher, Manchester : Carcanet, 1989, prints sixty-three letters from Sisson to the Carcanet Press. In the same volume Robert Hass assesses Sisson’s political thought.