Review
C.H. Sisson: English Poetry 1900-1950; Selected Poems
C.H. Sisson: English Poetry 1900-1950; Selected Poems, Carcanet Press: £9.95 and £3.95 respectively.
English Poetry 1900-1950 was first published in 1971 by Hart-Davis. For this Carcanet reissue the author has added a Post-script in which he says he feels that the outline drawn in it remains firm enough. As for poetry written since 1950, the business of discriminating amongst that is properly the business of someone who grew up in the second half of the century: 'A man does not judge his juniors as well as he judges his seniors and his contemporaries' (Mr Sisson cites Yeats in his notorious Oxford Book; more recently with Philip Larkin' s selection one sees that it is also possible for a man to be an erratic judge of his seniors and contemporaries).
Were English Poetry 1900-1950 simply its author's record of what he has found of importance to him amongst the poetry of his time, we would have before us something worth reading, for Mr Sisson is a poet to be reckoned with. But his judgements are rarely unconnected with his sense of what has constituted (and ought still to constitute) viable poetic speech in our century .Thus he speaks of a general, completely inartificial conversation amongst contemporaries of which what remains as the literature is, in some sense, the finest expression'. His pursuit of this 'inartificial conversation' gives his book an argumentative purposiveness: continuously stimulating, frequently challenging, it is a live piece of criticism to set against the many inert books put out by academic presses.
Mr Sisson's intention to question established reputations and to recommend neglected poets may be seen if one compares him on A.H. Bullen and Dylan Thomas. Bullen, who died six years after Thomas was born, gets something over two pages of discussion; Thomas a little less than two. Some of Bullen's epigrammatic verses, says Mr Sisson, catch 'the indubitable rhythm of the twentieth century': for instance 'Epicharmus' Counsel' -
Be wary; practise incredulity
Which makes the soul subtle and sinewy.
If 'poetical development presents itself as a purification of language', and there is considerably more to be said for this proposition than against it, Bullen's contribution to the cleansing that took place in the early decades of the century is, despite the stilted diction of many of his forty-odd verses, genuine. Thomas, in contrast, helpfully diagnoses his own case: 'I'm a freak user of words, not a poet.' And he is written off as a phenomenon of mainly historical importance - 'the prototype of much of the literary pretension of the forties'. Is there more to be said for Thomas than this? Well, on another occasion he allowed: 'Some of them may be poems', and I am inclined to give a handful the benefit of the doubt. Sadly, there is nothing in Thomas's output that speaks with the maturity of Bullen's couplet.
The former is neo-romantic, the latter neo-classic. Mr Sisson's allegiances are plain. Indeed they break surface towards the end of his piece on T.E. Hulme (whose ideas exercised a formative influence on his thinking) when he says, speaking of a man walking the sea-shore: 'The romantic is, so to speak, a holiday-maker, with vague thoughts of luxurious beauty. The classic is a man no less serious than the fisherman mending his nets.' The distinction tugs at its mooring, and one wonders if Mr Sisson wishes us to take it to heart in a general way. But even with the context before me, I cannot imagine Blake or Wordsworth succumbing in the manner suggested nor even the maturer Shelley (who, one recalls from Julian and Maddalo, had weighty matters on his mind when he rode the Adriatic coast with Byron).
Three of this book's thirteen chapters focus on single figures. That on Yeats is written backwards (chronologically, not in the Chinese fashion) as is Mr Sisson's novel Christopher Homm, and should be required reading for those who regard the Irishman with unmixed reverence. The chapter on Eliot is more quietly stimulating, and though I would take issue with Mr Sisson over Ash Wednesday (which I do not think demands to be read as an expression of belief which must carry us with it), I am with him in valuing the early work above Four Quartets and in regarding The Waste Land as Eliot's masterpiece. The essay on Pound is the least provocative of the three: in part because it deals as much with Pound the man of ideas as with Pound the poet.
Generous though this survey is - it investigates the work of more than thirty poets - it is doubtful whether any informed reader will not question some of Mr Sisson's decisions on whom and whom not to consider. Several undiscussed names flickered across my mind as I read, and of those which sent me to my bookshelves (and I can't make cases for poets I haven't looked at) Basil Bunting and Keith Douglas stood out. Mr Bunting's earlier work is most direct and memorable when underpinned by the verse of others Villon, Chomei – and that qualifies his claim. Douglas's maturest work still occasionally is marred by obtrusive poeticisms, but in 'Cairo Jag' he sustains a measured colloquial voice that conveys dispassionately a range of experience.
Differ with him as one may (and with whom doesn't one?), Mr Sisson has written a necessary book. Again and again the acuteness of his perceptions impressed me. For example -
Housman's view of poetry was limited in a way which would not have been possible to a serious writer whose mind had matured after 1910 ...
Rosenberg carried in him the unerased memory of former times, which are also the future, while the work of such a writer as Rupert Brooke is merely Georgian, or Edwardian...
Nothing could more completely demonstrate the involuntary nature of poetry than the inability of so inventive a man as Joyce, who clearly desired to write verse, to put more than a fraction of his thought into it…
The first two extracts demonstrate Mr Sisson's ability, thinking outwards from a specific body of work, to articulate the significant general truth. The third is the sort of insight that could only come from a practitioner, and it is one of the virtues of this book that it is likely to make a practising poet look hard at what he or she is doing.
Selected Poems (104 pages for £3.95) includes work from Anchises (1976) and Excursions (1980) but is not as good a buy as In The Trojan Ditch (228 pages), Mr Sisson's Collected Poems and Selected Translations, which is also available from Carcanet at £3.95. Robert Nye justly hailed this book in 1974 as 'the finest collected poems for a decade'.
Page(s) 101-104
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