Davison, Peter. The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, 1955-1960 from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf, 1994. Davison writes of the personal lives and struggles of poets he knew, including Sissman, whose collection he edited.

Eder, Richard. “The Suburbs of Parnassus.” Review of Night Music. The New York Times Book Review, August 15, 1999, 31. The reviewer finds the work to be of uneven quality but praises Sissman’s craftmanship and notes that he explored a “middle range of accessible experience.”

Gunton, Sharon R., ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 18. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981. The entry on Sissman notes that in an era of experimentation, he “clung to stanzaic verse, the iambic foot, couplets, and sonnets.”

Kennedy, X. J. “Innocence in Armor.” Review of Hello, Darkness and Innocent Bystander. Parnassus: Poetry in Review 8 (Fall/Winter, 1979): 48-63. Reviews Hello, Darkness and Innocent Bystander. Also discusses Sissman’s “other” life as an advertising executive and how this counted against him as a poet. By and large a sympathetic review that sees Sissman’s strength in the narrative poem, it calls his poem “Cancer: A Dream” harrowing in its description of hospitals and praises it for its “sustained length, in such cold intensity.”

Leithauser, Brad. “The Fixed Moment: The Poetry of L. E. Sissman.” New Criterion 2, no. 2 (October, 1983): 36-42. A critical assessment of Sissman’s poetic works.

Pritchard, William H. “Innocence Possessed.” The Times Literary Supplement, no. 3982 (July 28, 1978): 847. Discusses Sissman’s poem “Dying: An Introduction” and the impact it has coming from Sissman’s own experience of being “introduced” to his death. Says that in many ways Sissman was “possessed by his past.” Cites his last poems as his best, especially “Tras Os Montes.”

Updike, John. “Witness to His Dying.” Review of Hello, Darkness. The New York Times Book Review, May 14, 1978, 10. Updike defines the “Sissmanesque” mode as being one with “fascinating specificity” and describes it as “dense but dancing blank verse varied by spurts of rhyme.” He says Sissman’s poetry is less American than British in form and style. The three volumes of Sissman’s poetry sum up a world in themselves, a rarity in modern poetry.

Williamson, Alan. “Comment: Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L. E. Sissman.” Poetry 132, no. 1(November 1, 1978): 100-102. Notes Sissman’s “indiscriminate curiosity about how life is lived on the surface,” an unusual approach for a poet. Reveals that this poet’s strength is his power to suggest the “symbolism of incidentals.” On the other hand, notes his struggle to bring his verse to the level of “truly private feeling.”