Nachruf auf Charles Hubert Sisson (1914 – 2003)

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. …
Sisson remembered in adolescence how he knew a poem was about to happen, „and I had not to think about it in case I should spoil it – there is probably something in the nature of poetry which makes it necessary to avoid conscious premeditation“. …
His Versions and Perversions of Heine appeared in 1955, his first poetry publication. / Michael Schmidt, The Independent 9.9.03