Collected Poems

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After its early years, it developed into an international competition. In 2018, the announcements and presentations were hosted by Paul Tyler, Lord Linkinhorne (a patron of the Causley Trust), at the House of Lords. [15] After training in Plymouth and Lincolnshire, he joined the destroyer HMS Eclipse at Scapa Flow as an Ordinary Seaman Coder. Convoy escort duties took him to West Africa, and then Gibraltar, transferring to the shore base for service around the Med (where Eclipse later sank, with heavy losses). Rising to Petty Officer Coder, Causley joined the new carrier HMS Glory at Belfast, sailing to the Pacific. He was demobilised in 1946, chose to train as a teacher, and returned to teach in his old school for nearly 30 years. As the literary historian A. T. Tolley has noted, “Causley was one of the few poets to see the war continuously from the point of view of the lower ranks.” Farewell, Aggie Weston also has documentary importance since the poems incorporate a wealth of traditional and contemporary naval slang (much of which Causley explains in footnotes). Like Kipling fifty years earlier, Causley demonstrated that the best way to capture the true character of military men was to use their special language. This small volume provides a unique poetic record of the British navy in its last moment of imperial self-confidence. Causley was born at Launceston in Cornwall and was educated there and in Peterborough. His father died in 1924 from long-standing injuries from the First World War. Causley had to leave school at 15 to earn money, working as an office boy during his early years. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, as a coder, an experience he later wrote about in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark.

At first glance Charles Causley’s life may seem quiet, ordinary, perhaps even hum drum. A private man, he became a schoolteacher in the same school that he himself attended and he lived in a cottage just a few metres from the one in which he was born. An only child, who never married, he spent many years nursing his elderly mother and left his Cornish home only rarely. Yet through the prism of his poetry there emerges a vibrant world vividly observed and a life keenly felt. Credit: causleytrust.org In his own words Union Street (1957) secured Causley’s reputation as an important contemporary poet. Published with a preface by Edith Sitwell, then at the height of her influence, Union Street collected the best poems from Causley’s first two volumes and added nineteen new ones, including two of his finest poems ever, “I Am the Great Sun” and “At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux,” the last of which Sitwell singled out for particular praise. In her preface, Sitwell placed Causley’s work in its proper historical perspective–English folk song and ballad. While Sitwell praised Causley’s traditional roots, she also noted his “strange individuality.” Like most of Causley’s admirers, however, Sitwell had difficulty in explaining the particular appeal of his work. To express her approval, she repeatedly resorted to vague exclamations of delight, such as “beautiful,”“deeply moving,” and “enchanting.” While these terms describe in some general way the effect Causley’s poetry has on a sympathetic reader, they are so subjective that they shed little light on the special nature of his literary achievement. Unfortunately, Sitwell’s response typifies Causley’s critical reception. His admirers have felt more comfortable in writing appreciations of his work than in examining it in critical terms. The truly “strange individuality” that makes Causley a significant and original artist rather than a faux naif has never been adequately explained. This situation has given most critics the understandable but mistaken impression that while Causley’s poetry may be enjoyed, it is too simple to bear serious analysis. Dana Gioia and Charles Causley, 1984 From the late 1960s, Causley published poetry for children. Some are simple rhymes designed to delight younger readers mainly by their sound alone, while others carefully observe of people, the world and life, and tell strong stories. Many of these books were illustrated by prominent artists. Causley always agreed with the view that “there are no good poems for children that are only for children”, and indeed there is some overlap between his Collected Poems (several editions, the last of those coming out in 2001) and his Collected Poems for Children (1996).

Timeline Anthology

The June 2017 festival (the 8th) marked the centenary of Causley's birth in August 1917. There were rare performances of several of Causley's one-act plays from the 1930s, and a session from the illustrator John Lawrence and Gaby Morgan marking the reissue of Causley's Collected Poems for Children. The 2018 festival (the 9th) was headlined by poet and broadcaster Roger McGough, while the 10th festival was in June 2019.

However his quiet rural existence came to an end, as it did for many others, with the outbreak of the Second World War. Charles served as a coder in the Navy and his decision to go to sea was a direct reaction to his father’s terrible experiences in the trenches. Much of Causley’s early writing is infused with echoes of conflict, comradeship and loss. And it was after he left the navy that he began to write in earnest. Children’s toys?’Thematically, Farewell, Aggie Weston presents the issues that will concern him throughout his career–the harsh reality of war (“Son of the Dying Gunner”), the tragic deaths of the young and promising (“A Ballad for Katharine of Aragon”), the fascination of foreign landscapes (“HMS Glory at Sydney”), and, most important, the fall from innocence to experience, a sense of which pervades the entire volume. Only Causley’s restless, visionary Christianity is specifically absent from the volume, although with the gift of hindsight one can see the elements which nurtured it in several of the poems about death and war. Perhaps because of his years spent teaching Charles always had a special affinity with children and some of his best loved poetry was written for them. His book of poems for children ‘Figgie Hobbin’ named after a traditional raisin-filled Cornish pastry, was published in 1970 and I remember having it read to me as a child. Crammed with witty, satirical rhymes, many with a nod to Cornish legends, it became a firm family favourite. Rather unfairly stereotyped by some as ‘a ballad poet’ (perhaps because few ever used that form in the 20 th century), or ‘a children’s poet’ (linked to his primary-level teaching), or ‘a Cornish poet’ (since he indeed deeply loved the county), his ‘voice’ is simultaneously quite individual and recognisably universal. He loved landscapes, travel, music, art, history, myth and legend. And people, too: in all their mysterious varieties of life, pain, comedy and character.

International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 9 December 2021 . Retrieved 9 December 2021. Legacy [ edit ] Causley's grave in St Thomas Churchyard in Launceston, Cornwall, is barely 100 yards from where he was born Laurence Green (2013), All Cornwall Thunders at My Door: A Biography of Charles Causley. Sheffield: The Cornovia Press, p. 173, ISBN 978-1-908878-08-3. From boyhood Causley intended to be an author. He began a novel at the age of nine and continued writing in a desultory fashion throughout his education at Launceston College. At fifteen, however, Causley quit school to begin working. He spent seven gloomy years first as a clerk in a builder’s office and later working for a local electrical supply company. This period of isolation would have destroyed most aspiring young writers, but in Causley’s case, it proved decisive. Cut off from institutionalized intellectual life, he developed in the only way available–as an autodidact. “As far as poetry goes,” Causley has commented on these formative years, “I’m self-educated. I read very randomly, I read absolutely everything.” He also experimented–with poetry, fiction, and most successfully with drama. In the late 1930s he published three one-act plays. During the same period Causley also played piano in a four-piece dance band, an experience which may have influenced his later predilection for writing poems in popular lyric forms such as the ballad.

Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (2005). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. W.W. Norton & Company. p.1591.prize – Claire Dyer, 'Trust and the Horse'. [19] [20] Judges: Antony Caleshu, Miriam Darlington, Kim Martindale and Ronald Tamplin. [21] 2016 [ edit ]

Charles Causley Poetry Competition - Writing East Midlands". Writing East Midlands. Archived from the original on 18 January 2017 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Do you know, if I didn’t write poetry, I think I’d explode. All poetry is magic. It is a spell against insensitivity, failure of imagination, ignorance and barbarism. – Charles Causley. a b Mole, John. "Causley, Charles Stanley". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/92911. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) The University of Exeter: Special Collections (literary and personal papers of Charles Causley; reference EUL MS 50, et al) In June 2010, the first of a continuing series of annual Charles Causley Festivals took place in Launceston, held over a long weekend. Festival programmes encompass literature, music, art and a variety of other fields for adults, families and children, featuring performers and other contributors from the local area, the region, the whole of the UK, and even worldwide.If Causley’s loyalty to the ballad form appears a conspicuous anachronism, so, too, does his reliance on public subjects, historical material, and the narrative mode. He has been in almost every sense an outsider to the mainstream of contemporary poetry. His historical ballads in particular not only reject the metrical conventions of mid-century poetry (a tuneful stanza too simple for sophisticated formalists and too traditional for progressives), they also reject the notion that a poet creates a private reality in the context of his or her own poems. No private mythologies now for Causley. His work makes its appeal to a common reality outside the poem–usually an objectively verifiable reality of history or geography. Causley’s public is no ideological abstraction; his ideal readers are local and concrete–the Cornish. His regionalism grows naturally out of his aesthetic. The public nature of this imaginative gesture is also reinforced by Causley’s habitual measure, the ballad, the most popular and accessible form in English. The Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2016". Give me challenge. 15 October 2016 . Retrieved 18 January 2017.