Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Sissman, L(ouis) E(dward) (Vol. 18) - Alan Williamson

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ALAN WILLIAMSON

The late L. E. Sissman inherited from the post-war literary generation—which would really almost have been his own, had it not been for a long poetic silence—the love of impeccable pentameters, word-play, conceit, and allusion. Sometimes … Sissman loved these things far too well…. Usually his gamesmanship is of a [fine],… delicate kind, as in the lines about an adulterous couple pipe-dreaming of a future where "Bach plays/Behind them all their minuends of days," and where the reader hears "minuet," "diminuendo," and (to my ear) Prufrock's "butt-ends of my days," over the récherché literal word—"in arithmetic, the number or quantity from which another (the subtrahend) is to be subtracted"—in a wonderful shimmer of illusion and reality. Nevertheless, Sissman's brand of cleverness gave his poems a certain vers de société lilt that could not always be sloughed at will.

Sissman's posthumous well-wishers...

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1. Introduction
2. John Updike
3. William H. Pritchard
4. Alan Williamson
5. Joel Oppenheimer
6. Alfred Corn
7. Copyright

1. John Updike