A C. H. Sisson Reader

Cover; Title Page; Contents; Introduction; Poems; From The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems; On a Troopship; In Time of Famine: Bengal; The Body in Asia; In a Dark Wood; In London; Sparrows seen from an Office Window; In Kent; Maurras Young and Old; On the Way Home; Silence; Ightham Woods; Family Fortunes; In Honour of J.H. Fabre; Nude Studies; Tintagel; To Walter Savage Landor; Cranmer; Knole; On a Civil Servant; Money; Ellick Farm; The Un-Red Deer; The London Zoo; From Numbers (1965); My Life and Times; The Nature of Man; A and B; A Letter to John Donne; Words; The Thrush.;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 ret. Cover Title Page Contents Introduction Poems From The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems On a Troopship In Time of Famine: Bengal The Body in Asia In a Dark Wood In London Sparrows seen from an Office Window In Kent Maurras Young and Old On the Way Home Silence Ightham Woods Family Fortunes In Honour of J.H. Fabre Nude Studies Tintagel To Walter Savage Landor Cranmer Knole On a Civil Servant Money Ellick Farm The Un-Red Deer The London Zoo From Numbers (1965) My Life and Times The Nature of Man A and B A Letter to John Donne Words The Thrush. Adam and EveEaster In Memoriam Cecil De Vall The Death of a City Man No Title Thomas de Quincey The Theology of Fitness What a Piece of Work is Man The Reckoning From a Train Numbers From Metamorphoses (1968) Virgini Senescens Catullus In Allusion to Propertius, I, iii The Person Every Reality is a Kind of Sign On my Fifty-first Birthday From the new poems in In the Trojan Ditch (1974) The Discarnation No Address Evening Aller Church The Usk Morpheus Somerton Moor In insula Avalonia Martigues A Ghost (1974, uncollected) From Anchises (1976) Cotignac The Quantocks. GardeningThe Evidence Eastville Park Marcus Aurelius The Garden Anchises Troia Est in conspectu Tenedos From Exactions (1980) The Desert Place The Zodiac The Pool Differently Style Ham Hill Moon-rise from The Garden of the Hesperides (****) The Herb-garden The Surfaces The Red Admiral The Morning For Passing the Time Leaves Autumn Poems Across the Winter In Flood Burrington Combe From the new poems in Collected Poems (1984) The Time of Year Two Capitals Athelney The Broken Willow Blackdown From God Bless Karl Marx! (1987) Read me or not. Vigil and Ode for St George's DayWaking The Absence The Hare God Bless Karl Marx! Looking at Old Note-Books Taxila From Antidotes (1991) Fifteen Sonnets The Christmas Rose Uncertainty Muchelney Abbey (from On the Departure) From What and Who (1994) The Mendips Et in Arcadia ego Steps to the Temple April The Lack Peat Trees in a Mist The Levels Broadmead Brook Absence Casualty Poems from Collected Poems (1998) Five Lines Triptych Tristia The Verb To Be Indefinition Finale Translations Roman Poems Carmen Saeculare (Horace) Palinurus (Virgil, Aeneid V, 835ff.). The Descent (Virgil, Aeneid VI)Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi (Horace, Odes I, xi) Hactenus arvorum cultus (Virgil, Georgics II) Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume (Horace, Odes II, xiv) Essays From the New English Weekly (1937-1949) Charles Maurras and the Idea of a Patriot King Prejudice as an Aid to Government English Liberalism The Civil Service Charles Péguy Epitaph on Nuremberg T.S. Eliot on Culture Ego Scriptor: The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound Order and Anarchy: An Essay on Intellectual Liberty Charles Maurras Reflections on Marvell's Ode. 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 #x91;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, #x91;No poet has written with anything like his intimate knowledge of the workings of 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-firstcentury reader's expectations and discontents. This book, first published in 1993, collects Spark's essays on the Brontës, her selection of their letters and of Emily's poetry. Evident throughout are Spark's critical intelligence, dry wit, and refusal to sentimentalise #x96; qualities that gave her own novels their particular appeal. At the same time, The Essence of the Brontës is Muriel Spark's tribute to the sisters whose talents #x91;placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity' 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.