Word: sissman
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...Arts. Anybody's guess is good here. L. E. Sissman '48, the poet, is possibly but unlikely. It is hard to envision she Corporation swallowing Norman Mailer '43, but John Updike '54 might be more acceptable. In the plastic arts, almost anybody could be named. The Washington Post reported yesterday that South African author and Nobel Prize winner Alan Paton is coming to the Boston area this week to pick up an honorary from a local college...
...Aging, grey, in the cloud-shadows of Commencement Day," L. E. Sissman '18 returned to Sanders yesterday to address the literary exercises of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Massachusetts...
...Sissman, the insurance man turned poet, read a semi-autobiographical poem in seven parts, "Temporary Measures: A Book of Hours," which he had composed for the occasion. The poem recounted Sissman's life, from Lowell R-34 to "the stars which swallow us in distance now and soon enough in death...
...became a Poet. I translated other poets, among them Horace and Catullus. I read Robert Lowell and L. E. Sissman (I wasn't proud), and walked around feeling, and wondering when I'd first win the National Book Award. I began to sound like Lowell, too. Not that I could write the way he could: but I absorbed his diction the way I absorbed the rest of Harvard. And along with his speech. I began to mimic Lowell's aimless guilt and sense of inadequacy; I became tortured, at eighteen. I wanted to check into McLean. I didn't know...
...best part of the issue is the poetry. The Garrison Prize poems, "England, 1935," by L. E. Sissman, and William Morgan's "Two Hymn Tunes," are sonorous works. Sissman's piece shows the author's ear for sound ("Battersea's four gaunt towers in their dreams fumed") and atmosphere, but Morgan's poem, especially his second "Tune" shows the greater sensitivity. John C. Fiske makes the standard reply to William Carlos Williams in his "Lines" to that poet ("Let us not call traditional forms a crime/Lest innovation be the thief of rime") but his poetic rebuttal is too contrived...