Synopses & Reviews
This book is the most comprehensive collection of essays, criticisms, and analyses of the author C. H. Sisson, dubbed as “one of the great translators of our time” by the Times Literary Supplement. This work provides an insightful look into C. H. Sisson’s work and that of his peers, and provides readers with a better understanding of the state of literature in Britain and Europe in the 20th century.
Synopsis
C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the 'last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer scope of Sisson's writings on literature, culture and politics (he was a senior civil servant before retirement). The editors declare, 'No poet has government, and few have had a clearer sense of the role of literature in participating in civic life.' An heir to Marvell, Hardy and Edward Thomas, Sisson brings to this essential Englishness the disruptive energies of modernism. Never a comfortable or comforting writer, he is an incisive intelligence and speaks with clarity to the twenty-first-century reader's expectations and discontents.
About the Author
C. H. Sisson was a poet, an author, an essayist and a translator. Charlie Louth is a translator and teaches German at the University of Oxford. Patrick McGuinness is an award-winning poet and author and teaches French and comparative literature at the University of Oxford.