Collected Poems

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Charles Causley Poetry Competition - Writing East Midlands". Writing East Midlands. Archived from the original on 18 January 2017 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Causley at 70 (Peterloo Poets, 1987 – ed. Harry Chambers): a collection of 25 poetry and prose tributes from other writers, plus 9 items of archival material, unpublished autobiographical fragments, etc., by Causley, and a bibliography; ISBN 978-0905291895 Causley is one of today’s preeminent writers of children’s poetry, and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. Early in the Morning: A Collection of New Poems (1986), with music by Anthony Castro and illustrations by Michael Foreman

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!”. His poetry frequently refers to Cornwall and its legends, and Causley was recognised by being made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1955. His scope and interests, however, stretched far beyond his native county. In addition, many poems relate to fellow writers like Keats, Clare, Lorca, Day-Lewis, Clemo, Betjeman and to artists he admired: Van Gogh, Samuel Palmer and Maxim Gorky, as well as the sculptor of local East Cornish origin, Nevill Northey Burnard. Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language: an American looks at contemporary British poetry (2003), University of Michigan Press, ISBN 9780472095827; pg. 58. According to the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, [11] "because his characteristic themes, preoccupations, and freshness of language vary little, it is often difficult to distinguish between his writings for children and those for adults. He himself declared that he did know whether a given poem was for children or adults as he was writing it, and he included his children's poetry without comment in his collected works." [11] a b Zipes, J., et al., eds (2005), The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, New York & London: Norton ISBN 0-393-97538-X; pg. 1253.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. 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. 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. 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. Not for working-class Causley, however, was the ironic detachment, emotional reserve, and guarded knowingness of his Oxonian counterparts. Causley possesses an essential innocence that Amis never reveals and Larkin hid under layers of ironic self-deprecation. Although their poetic tastes often coincide–and the three conspicuously share Hardy and Auden as decisive masters–their personalities differ dramatically. One sees the divergences most relevantly in their attitudes toward childhood. Amis seems never to have been a child; his life began with adolescence and its illicit pleasures of sex, liquor, tobacco, and literature. Larkin saw his own affluent but loveless boyhood as an unendurable emptiness. Causley’s childhood, however, which was much harsher and more painful, often serves as a sacramental presence in his work. He presents no distinct adult persona–no cagey university librarian or sharp-clawed literary lion–separate from the Cornish schoolboy who has matured seamlessly into a successful writer. And yet, if Causley’s innocence is tangible in the poetry, it has been tempered by hard experience of death, war, and suffering.

He spent his evenings writing and his first collection of poems about his war time experiences, ‘F arewell Aggie Weston’ was published in 1951. In perhaps one of the most striking poems ‘Convoy’ Causley’s vividly laments the death of a sailor in the North Sea, perhaps an expression of the guilt he felt returning home when so many others didn’t. Writing because you must . . . 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. Among the English poetry of the last half century, Charles Causley’s could well turn out to be the best loved and most needed.’ 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.

Sir Andrew Motion to Judge The Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2016". Literature Works SW - Nurturing literature development activity in South West England. 21 September 2016 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. 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. Waterman, Rory (2016), Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley, Routledge Publishing. 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 . . . 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.