Collected Poems

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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. Perhaps because of that widespread perception of Causley as a poetic 'outsider', academia has so far paid less attention to his work than it might have done. However, the publication over recent years of a book of critical essays edited by Michael Hanke, Through the Granite Kingdom, as well as a number of dissertations about Causley's work (alone, or alongside poets such as Larkin and R. S. Thomas) suggest that this situation is changing.

Twenty-Five Poems by Hamdija Demirovic (1980), translated with the author from the original Yugoslavian Poetry (ballads, other formal poetic structures and free verse; also, children's poetry); short plays, including for radio; libretti; short stories; essays and criticism.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). 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.

Born in Launceston in 1917, Causley attended the Cornish town’s ‘National School’ and Grammar schools. Thereafter, he was largely self-educated, working in ordinary jobs between until enlisting in 1940. 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. 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!”. The resemblance is not merely a matter of rhyme and meter, stanza and tone. It is also one of spiritual genealogy–of primal sympathy and imaginative temperament. Like the Blake of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Causley is a demotic visionary, a poet who finds the divine–and the demonic–in the everyday world and reports it without apology in the available forms and accessible images of one’s time and place. Causley’s characteristic mode is often the short narrative (and he has never been tempted into the epic private mythology of the late Prophetic Books), but his decisive source is not Hardy or Auden, as important as they were in other ways, but Blake. His late eighteenth-century master, moreover, also provided him a potent example of how the poetic outsider can become a seer–a lesson not likely to be lost on a working-class Cornish writer remote from the Oxbridge world of literary London forty years ago.Causley’s work doesn’t focus exclusively on the county of his birth however. His time spent with the Royal Navy during the 1940s gave him some opportunity to see the world beyond the Cornish coast and to spend time with his other great love – the sea. Charles Causley Poetry Competition - Writing East Midlands". Writing East Midlands. Archived from the original on 18 January 2017 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Legacy [ edit ] Causley's grave in St Thomas Churchyard in Launceston, Cornwall, is barely 100 yards from where he was born

A bright and bookish child, he devoured the written word wherever he found it – including the romantic novels his mother, Laura, regularly borrowed from Launceston library.Causley is one of today’s preeminent writers of children’s poetry, and his children’s verse bears an illuminating relation to his work for adults. “When I write a poem,” Causley has commented, “I don’t know whether it’s for a child or adult.” His children’s book, Figgie Hobbin (1970), for instance, reveals the continuity of his work. Although the poems in Figgie Hobbin are simple in structure and often written from a child’s perspective, they are almost indistinguishable from his adult verse. (It is instructive to remember that Blake published his Songs of Innocence as an illustrated children’s book. It was posterity that reclassified it to the more respectable category of pure lyric.) In these children’s poems he explores his major themes in a fully characteristic way. Indeed they fit seamlessly into the Collected Poems (1975), where they are presented without comment among his adult poems. Moreover, as a group, these tight and polished poems rank high among Causley’s published work, and validate his theory that a truly successful children’s poem is also a genuine adult poem. “What Has Happened to Lulu?,”“Tell, Me, Tell Me, Sarah Jane,” and “If You Should Go to Caistor Town” are among Causley’s most accomplished ballads; “I Saw a Jolly Hunter” is among his best humorous poems. “I Am the Song” has an epigrammatic perfection that eludes classification, and and “Who?” may be the finest lyric he has ever written. First and foremost Causley was a poet of place. He called Cornwall ‘the granite kingdom’ and always recognised and revelled in its unique qualities. Much of his work has a Cornish flavour, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes wistful, whimsical even but always celebrating Cornwall’s history, legends and its elemental landscape. Johnny Alleluia also marks a deepening of Causley’s thematic concerns. Many poems explore his complex vision of Christ as humanity’s redeemer. Fully half the poems in this volume use Christ figures either explicitly, as in “ Cristo de Bristol” and “Emblems of the Passion,” or by implication, in strange transformations such as those in “For an Ex-Far East Prisoner of War” and “Guy Fawkes’ Day,” where the effigy burning in the holiday fire becomes a redemptive sacrificial victim. Likewise Causley alternates scurrilous parodies of the Christ story, such as “Sonnet to the Holy Vine” and the more disturbing “Master and Pupil” with his most devout meditations. Reading his many treatments of the Christian drama, one sees that Causley believes in the redemptive nature of Christ’s sacrifice, but that he doubts man’s ability to accept Christ’s love without betraying it. He was much in demand at poetry readings in the United Kingdom and worldwide—the latter travels were sometimes as part of Arts Council and British Council initiatives. He also made many television and radio appearances over the post-war period, particularly for the BBC in the West Country, and as the presenter for many years of the BBC Radio 4 series Poetry Please. Early in the Morning: A Collection of New Poems (1986), with music by Anthony Castro and illustrations by Michael Foreman

In 1982, on his 65th birthday, a book of poems was published in his honour that included contributions from Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and twenty-three other poets, testifying to the respect and indeed love that the British poetry community had for him. This was followed by a fuller and more wide-ranging tribute (including some unpublished reflective essays, and reproductions of several drafts of his poem 'Immunity' from his archive at Exeter University), published in 1987 and entitled Causley at 70. 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. 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.”Charles Causley: Theatre Works (Alan M. Kent, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2013); ISBN 978-1903427774 The Charles Causley Trust, a registered charity, exists to celebrate his life and work and promote new literature activity in the community and region in which he lived. [13] In 2006, the trust secured Cyprus Well, the poet's small house in Launceston, for the nation. After considerable repairs, refurbishment and upgrading, that has been opened on a limited basis to the public, and to provide a facility for a varied programme of activities. Most particularly, there has been a series of residencies for writers of all kinds, artists and musicians, as well as other heritage events. These promote both Causley's life and work, and the arts in general—especially across the South West region of Cornwall and Devon. But war – the impact of 1914-18 (and still earlier conflicts), as well as of 1939-45 – seems always inescapable. Even poems with no immediate connection to the conflict often subtly signal its lasting power and influence. The poem comprises six stanzas, four of four lines each, one of three lines, and a final single-line stanza. This enables the poet to build up the picture, reaching a dramatic climax, and the final one-lined stanza a resolution. There is a regular rhyme scheme in that every line ends with consonant rhyme in groups of four, ABAB, CDCD etc. For example, ‘spins’ and ‘suns’ in stanza four; ‘dress’ and ‘grass’ in stanza two. This gives a sense of cohesion, but is so subtly done that it is easy to miss. International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 30 March 2020 . Retrieved 25 August 2020.