xxvi introduction
David Hume (1976) is entirely absent, and only one chapter is taken from The Case of Walter Bagehot (1972), despite its importance and readability; and only two and half from English Poetry 1900–1950: An Assessment (1971). From among the essays proper we have included all that we really wanted in, but there is a great deal more that could also have been included. Sisson wrote essays and reviews all his life, and together they are a fascinating education in the sources of his thinking, as well as being lucid, thought-provoking, and often very witty. There is in the end little from the ecclesiastical essays (only one from Anglican Essays (1983)) – the writing there is often more polemical and contextbound. What we wanted to bring out is Sisson’s close engagement with the times and with politics throughout his writing life, and the independence, intelligence and civility of his opinions. 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.
The poems themselves are uncompromising, contradictory, afflicted, savage, sometimes abrasive, and pursue disquieting truths. Much of the time, they seem to invite dissent, and their positions, though growing out of a clearly recognisable English tradition, have never been those of the mainstream, not even the mainstream which likes to see itself as marginal. Yet his work has a certain centrality too. Civically, in that it is concerned with the public sphere and with keeping channels open to the past; with maintaining clear-sightedness and countering a world where ‘the denial of the sources of our thinking’ has become ‘an indispensable preliminary to any intervention on the public stage’ (The Case of Walter Bagehot). And then poetically, in its crossing of a tradition that flows out of Edward Thomas, Hardy and Barnes with the nervous energies and disruptions of Eliot and Pound:
There is one God we do not know Stretched on Orion for a cross
And we below In several sorts of lesser loss
Are we In number not identity.
(‘The Person’)
