Collected Poems

Product Information

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 His early life in Launceston was far from idyllic. Cornwall, like the rest of the country, was struggling with the repercussions of the First World War. It was a time of poverty and grief. Causley’s own childhood was tainted by the death of his father, also called Charles, who had never recovered from the effects of fighting in the trenches. Although just seven year old when he died, one of Causley’s few memories of his father was reading aloud to him while he was unwell. Causley with his mother in the 1960s

Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry (2003), University of Michigan Press, ISBN 9780472095827; pg. 58.

The Beginnings

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.” He began writing plays in the 1930s including Runaway (1936) and The Conquering Hero (1937), and served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, an experience he wrote about in Hands to Dance: Short Stories (1951), a collection of short stories, and in his first two collections of poetry, Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951) and Survivor's Leave (1953). Union Street: Poems (1957) included poems from both collections and was published with an introduction by the writer Edith Sitwell. The fifth festival in June 2014 was prefaced by the unveiling of a memorial plaque at Cyprus Well (another one later marked his nearby birthplace near St Thomas Church and the River Kensey). That festival also marked the centenary of the start of the First World War with a series of talks on war poetry. A documentary film about Causley's life and work, made by Jane Darke and Andrew Tebbs of Boatshed Films, featured in several versions across the 6th and 7th festivals (2015 and 2016). A shortened version of the full 1990 film, The Poet: Charles Causley, was broadcast on BBC4 as Charles Causley: Cornwall's Native Poet on 1 October 2017. Twenty-Five Poems by Hamdija Demirovic (1980), translated with the author from the original Yugoslavian 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.

All Cornwall Thunders at My Door: a Biography of Charles Causley (Laurence Green, The Cornovia Press, 2013); ISBN 978-1908878083 In the collection’s final poem ‘Who’ Causley writes of seeing the ghostly figure of himself as a child haunting the places around Launceston he has known his whole life. He sees his younger self wandering beside the River Kensey in old fashioned clothes and has a vision of the fields where he once played, now covered by houses. From the Other Bank . . . 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.Collected Poems: several editions, starting in 1975 and culminating with Collected Poems 1951-2000 (2000) In “Cowboy Song,” another young man, bereft of family, knows he will be murdered before his next birthday. Even a seemingly straightforward narrative such as the “Ballad of the Faithless Wife” acquires a dark visionary quality when in the last stanza, personal tragedy unexpectedly modulates into allegory: Causley left school at 16, working as a clerk in a builder's office. [1] He played in a semi-professional dance band, and wrote plays—one of which was broadcast on the BBC West Country service before World War II. Charles Causley Poetry Competition Winners". Literature Works SW - Nurturing literature development activity in South West England. 22 January 2015 . Retrieved 18 January 2017.

Charles Causley: Theatre Works (Alan M. Kent, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2013); ISBN 978-1903427774 Waterman, Rory (2016), Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley, Routledge Publishing. One of Causley’s most famous poems, By St Thomas Water, conjures up his childhood self playing in the churchyard in Launceston where both he and his mother now rest side by side. The poem, dreamy and nostalgic, has Charles and his playmate Jessie fishing with jam-jars but also refers to a local superstition. There is a stone outside the church door that the children would put their ears against to hear the dead talking. Causley’s writing has many tones: not just sombre or portentous. His poetry – comic, magical, mischievous, mystical, spiritual (and spirited) by turns – has impressive technical skill, much learning lightly worn, and an unfailing instinct for coining an image or a turn of phrase. 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.prize – Claire Dyer, 'Trust and the Horse'. [19] [20] Judges: Antony Caleshu, Miriam Darlington, Kim Martindale and Ronald Tamplin. [21] 2016 [ edit ] In 1958, Charles Causley was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), and was awarded a CBE in 1986. Amongst a number of other other awards, he was given the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967, and was presented with the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in 2000, when he characteristically exclaimed (at the age of 83), “Goodness! What an encouragement!”. 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.) Now eighty, Charles Causley stands as one of Britain’s three or four finest living poets. He is the master of at least five major poetic modes or genres–the short narrative, the war poem, the religious poem, children’s poetry, and the personal lyric. The historical accident that none of these categories, except the last, is currently fashionable among literary critics will not concern posterity. Nor does it greatly concern most contemporary readers. No other living British poet of Causley’s distinction rivals his general popularity or commands so diverse a readership. His admirers stretch from schoolchildren to his fellow poets. (After Betjeman’s death, British poets voted Causley as their first choice to become the next Poet Laureate.) The special quality of this esteem is evident in the comments of the current Laureate, Ted Hughes: As the book’s title suggests, Causley’s major theme in Survivor’s Leave once again is war, though here the conflict has been universalized beyond World War II into a tragic view of life as a doomed struggle between the evil and the innocent. The book bristles with images of violence and deception. In “Recruiting Drive,” a butcher-bird lures young men to their deaths in battle. (A few months after the appearance of Survivor’s Leave, Auden first published a similar poem “The Willow-wren and the Stare,” in Encounter. Perhaps Causley had some slight influence on his own mentor.)