Collected Poems

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The final collections of new poetry — Secret Destinations (1984), Twenty-One Poems (1986) and A Field of Vision (1988) — are a prolific and impressive late flowering, with new subjects, approaches and styles alongside mature developments of his familiar ones. After demobilisation in 1946, he took advantage of a government scheme to train as a teacher at Peterborough. He then worked full-time as a teacher at his old school for over 35 years, teaching for his very final year at St. Catherine's CofE Primary elsewhere in the town, where the National School had been relocated. He twice spent time in Perth as a visiting Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and also worked at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada. Waterman, Rory (2016), Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley, Routledge Publishing. To call Causley’s aesthetic conservative, however, fails to describe its radical independence from literary trends. He deserves some designation both more specific and singular to differentiate him from fellow travelers of the counterrevolutionary fifties like Larkin and Amis. They made common cause of agnosticism in face of international Modernism’s Great Awakening. They share an intoxication with traditional meters (though all three write superbly in free verse when occasion demands). They recognize the efficiency of a clear narrative line, even in their lyrical utterances. Contrarians all, they came to maturity in the Sturm und Drang of Dylan Thomas and The New Apocalypse–a feverish milieu that confirmed their native anti-romanticism. In 1940 Causley joined the Royal Navy in which he served for the next six years. Having spent all of his earlier life in tranquil Cornwall, he now saw wartime southern Europe, Africa, and Australia. Likewise, having already felt the tragedy of war through the early death of his father, Causley experienced it again more directly in the deaths of friends and comrades. These events decisively shaped his literary vision, pulling him from prose and drama into poetry. “I think I became a working poet the day I joined the destroyer Eclipse at Scapa Flow in August, 1940,” he later wrote. “Though I wrote only fragmentary notes for the next three years, the wartime experience was a catalytic one. I knew that at last I had found my first subject, as well as a form.” Although Causley wrote one book of short stories based on his years in the Royal Navy, Hands to Dance (1951, revised and enlarged in 1979 as Hands to Dance and Skylark), his major medium for portraying his wartime experiences has been poetry.

Causley wrote only early drafts of some poems whilst in the Navy, publishing just one (although several short plays were broadcast and published in the 1930s). The floodgates of his poetry and other writing only really opened after the war, in an ordinary civilian working life underpinned by naval experience, lore and language – as well as a powerful sense of ‘survivor’s guilt’. Indeed, one early published collection (1953) was entitled Survivor’s Leave. Other collections include Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951: see below), Union Street (1957), Johnny Alleluia (1961), Underneath the Water (1968), Secret Destinations (1984) and A Field of Vision (1988). He published many collections for children as well as a short-story collection mainly about wartime experiences – Hands to Dance and Skylark (1951). prize – Claire Dyer, 'Trust and the Horse'. [19] [20] Judges: Antony Caleshu, Miriam Darlington, Kim Martindale and Ronald Tamplin. [21] 2016 [ edit ] Causley’s next volume, Johnny Alleluia (1961), continues to explore the visionary possibilities of the demotic style. This fourth collection presents no stylistic break with Survivor’s Leave or Union Street. The poems remain exclusively in rhyme and meter, though he uses traditional prosodic forms with more overt sophistication to deal with increasingly complex material. The ballad continues to be his central form, though one now notices a pronounced division in the kinds of ballads Causley writes. In addition to ballads on contemporary themes (whose effects are often primarily lyrical), each volume now contains a group of strictly narrative ballads usually based on historical or legendary Cornish subjects. While Causley had from the beginning experimented with recreating the folk ballad, this enterprise now becomes a major preoccupation. In the introduction to his anthology Modern Ballads and Story Poems (1965), Causley confesses the basis of his fascination with “the ancient virtues of this particular kind of writing.” The narrative poem or ballad, he writes, allows the poet to speak “without bias or sentimentality.” It keeps the author from moralizing, but it “allows the incidents of his story to speak for themselves, and, as we listen, we remain watchful for all kinds of ironic understatements.” Early in the Morning: A Collection of New Poems (1986), with music by Anthony Castro and illustrations by Michael Foreman Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2015 – Josephine Corcoran". josephinecorcoran.org . Retrieved 18 January 2017.Truth. Sense. One hopes by now everyone has found something at which to cringe. These are not respectable terms to describe–let alone praise–serious poetry at the end of the twentieth century. But what if Hughes, Sitwell, and Larkin are right in the criteria they use?–not right for every poet in every period but for the particular case of Causley? What if he is indeed a poet who has found an authentic, inventive and powerful way to do what poets have traditionally done–to give their own people unforgettable and truthful words, images, and stories by which to apprehend their lives and time? Some readers think so. Count me as one of them. Charles Causley: Theatre Works (Alan M. Kent, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2013); ISBN 978-1903427774 The collection Survivor's Leave followed in 1953, and from then until his death Causley published frequently, in magazines, in his own volumes and shared ones, in anthologies and then in several editions of his Collected Poems.

The visionary mode has its greatest range of expression in Causley’s religious poetry. No reader of Farewell, Aggie Weston would have guessed that its author would become one of the few contemporary Christian poets of genuine distinction. Yet the new poems in Union Street confirmed Causley’s transformation from veteran to visionary. The devotional sonnet, “I Am the Great Sun,” which opens the section of new poems reveals a more overtly compassionate side to Christianity than found in Survivor’s Leave. Here Christ speaking from the cross (the poem was inspired by a seventeenth-century Norman crucifix) announces his doomed love for man: Other awards include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1971. In 1973/74 he was visiting fellow in poetry at the University of Exeter, from which institution he received an honorary doctorate on 7 July 1977. [7]Between 1962 and 1966, he was a working member of the Poetry Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. After he retired from his career in primary school teaching , Causley was appointed as a Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Exeter, and he was made an honorary Doctor of Letters (Hon. D.Litt.) there in 1977. With the collections of poetry that followed ‘Survivor’s Leave’ and ‘Union Street’ his reputation was firmly established and in 1958 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His close friend the poet Ted Hughes said: Bare Fiction - Charles Causley Poetry Competition 1st... | Facebook". www.facebook.com. Archived from the original on 26 February 2022 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. 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. 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

Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley’s could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed.’ 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.Considered one of the most important British poets of his generation, Charles Causley was born, lived and died in the small Cornish town of Launceston. But despite initial appearances his was anything but an inactive or uneventful life. Poetry (ballads, other formal poetic structures and free verse; also, children's poetry); short plays, including for radio; libretti; short stories; essays and criticism. Collected Poems (1975) solidified Causley’s reputation in England and broadened his audience in America. The volume was widely reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic almost entirely in a positive light, but most critics presented Causley’s achievement in a reductive manner. While they admired the ease and openness of his work and praised his old-fashioned commitment to narrative poetry, they did not generally find the resonance of language that distinguishes the finest contemporary poetry. By implication, therefore, they classified Causley as an accomplished minor poet, an engagingly eccentric antimodernist, who had mastered the traditional ballad at the expense of more experimental work. Only Edward Levy’s essay on the Collected Poems in Manchester’s PN Review made a serious attempt to demonstrate the diversity of Causley’s achievement and his importance as a lyric poet. Fortunately, subsequent critics such as Robert McDowell, D. M. Thomas, Michael Schmidt, and Samuel Maio have followed Levy’s lead to make broader claims for Causley’s work. Causley’s first published collection of poems, Farewell, Aggie Weston, was published by The Hand and Flower Press in 1951. Survivor’s Leave followed in 1953, and his literary reputation was fully established in 1957 with Union Street by Rupert Hart-Davis, featuring an enthusiastic introduction by Edith Sitwell. Other collections of new poems by Causley came out during the 1960s: Johnny Alleluia and Underneath the Water. His poetry became widely anthologised, and to he shared volumes with other contemporary British poets. He also cemented his reputation as an anthologist, critic, essayist and broadcaster — especially as the host of BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please for many years.

As well as words Causley loved music and was able to play both the fiddle and the piano. In his youth he was the pianist of a local band called the Rhythm Boys and provided the music for village dances around Cornwall. He once said ‘I think I have frightened more woodworm out of more pianos than anyone in the west of England.’ War & Teaching 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. An art exhibition entitled 'Charles Causley: A Tribute from the Artists' was organised to coincide with Causley's 70th birthday in 1987 by Ron Tamplin of Exeter University, and featured a wide range of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures. It later transferred from the University to the Institute of Education in Russell Square, London, for a period; an illustrated catalogue was published. Around 50 of Charles Causley’s 270-odd poems deal directly with war, to at least some extent: ‘his’ war, especially. A fine, characteristic example – capturing his time and friends at sea (as opposed to those poems powerfully considering what it all means in hindsight) – is ‘Song of the Dying Gunner AA1’. It’s a ballad shot through with sailors’ slang and the wistful musings of an anonymous casualty representing so many – some of whom Causley himself knew well.

From the Other Bank . . .

Charles Stanley Causley CBE FRSL (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a British poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall. August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness and for its associations with folklore, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.Prize-winning poet, playwright and children's author Charles Causley was born in Launceston, Cornwall, on 24 August 1917, and was educated at Launceston College and Peterborough Training College. Charles Stanley Causley (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness and for its associations with folklore, especially when linked to his native Cornwall. The Charles Causley International Poetry Prize is administered by the Causley Trust and is open to anyone over the age of 18. It began in 2013 and has continued in most years since, with a steadily-increasing number of entries. There are a number of monetary prizes and a good deal of publicity for the prize-winning poets and those achieving honourable mentions.