The words C.H. Sisson uses to honor David Hume identify the distinguishing qualities of his own writing: like Hume, Sisson has the ability to be "patient of the truth, as he sees it, to the point of being disconcerting," and he also shares with Hume "the sense of discovery with which he sets out, and the disillusion with which he surveys his conclusions." Because the truth he sees is sometimes opposed to current literary fashions and ideological postures, Sisson stands apart from his contemporaries. He has written: "The poetry owners cannot make me out/Nor I them." Yet such estrangement or lack of fashion, as Martin Seymour-Smith has recognized, is "only as unfashionable as seriousness." Sisson stands apart, too, because he was forty-seven before publishing his first major collection of verse, The London Zoo (1961). Not until 1974, with In the Trojan Ditch, brought out when he was sixty...