Collected Poems

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Charles Causley: Theatre Works (Alan M. Kent, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2013); ISBN 978-1903427774 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).

Most critics also missed the unexpected direction signaled by the twenty-three new poems in the collection. While continuing to employ rhyme and meter, Causley returned to free verse for the first time since Farewell, Aggie Weston. This shift opened his work to new effects while liberating his talent for description. In “Ten Types of Hospital Visitor,” which opens the “New Poems” section of his Collected Poems, Causley creates a detailed panorama of hospital life which unexpectedly modulates from realism to visionary fancy. In “Ward 14” Causley uses free verse to achieve painful directness in his description of a man visiting his old, brain-damaged mother in the hospital. These poems demonstrate a richness of depiction and high degree of psychological naturalism not often found in Causley’s earlier work. They also reveal the increasingly autobiographic interests that will characterize his later work. While mastering new techniques, however, Causley did not jettison traditional form. He ends the Collected Poems with several formal poems, most notably “A Wedding Portrait,” one of his most important poems of self-definition. Here the poet’s past and present, innocence and experience, are literally embodied in the scene of his middle-aged self looking at his parents’ wedding photograph. His doomed father and mother appear innocently hopeful in the portrait while the adult poet knows the subsequent pain they will undergo. His present knowledge cannot help them escape their plight, and he remains cut off from them now by time and death as absolutely as he was nonexistent to them on their wedding day. In a visionary moment Causley looks to his art to bridge the gap to time and restore his dead parents to him and his lost childhood self to them. The 1975 Collected Poems ends with the affirmation of poetry’s power to triumph over death: 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 . . . Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (2005). The Norton Anthology of Poetry. W.W. Norton & Company. p.1591. Causley was born at Launceston, Cornwall, to Charles Samuel Causley, who worked as a groom and gardener, and his wife Laura Jane Bartlett, who was in domestic service. He was educated at the local primary school and Launceston College. When he was seven, in 1924, his father died from long-standing injuries incurred in World War I. [1]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 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. 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

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.) 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 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). 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.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: The University of Exeter: Special Collections (literary and personal papers of Charles Causley; reference EUL MS 50, et al) 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.

Guz" = Devonport; "tiddley suit" = very smart suit.—Partridge, E. (1961), A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; 5th ed.; pp. 364 & 883. Charles Causley gallery". Charles Causley Society. Archived from the original on 25 July 2011 . Retrieved 27 June 2011. 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 Zipes, J., et al., eds (2005), The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, New York & London: Norton ISBN 0-393-97538-X; pg. 1253. We are left with uncertainties. Is the speaker expecting to die soon as well? The stream and the reference to crossing it in stanza four could suggest he is waiting to cross over; to die and join them. 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. Waterman, Rory (2016), Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley, Routledge Publishing. In terms of Causley's musical legacy, an original opera by Steven McNeff based on Causley's libretto 'The Burning Boy', was premiered by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's Kokoro Ensemble in Launceston and St. Ives in November 2017. The majority of the songs of Alex Atterson (1931–1996) are settings of Causley poems. [14]

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. 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.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. That haunted – and haunting – blend of reflections on comradeship, loss, anger, isolation, shame and obligation informs many of his poems drawing upon war in one way or another. Some recount evocative episodes, or sketch insightful portraits, from Causley’s six years of service. Others are a veteran’s musings, up to nearly 50 years on, about ‘aftermath’. The war subtly infused much of his peacetime world and vision. 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.