Charles Causley Poetry Competition Winners". Literature Works SW - Nurturing literature development activity in South West England. 22 January 2015 . Retrieved 18 January 2017.

Rather unfairly stereotyped by some as ‘a ballad poet’ (perhaps because few ever used that form in the 20 th century), or ‘a children’s poet’ (linked to his primary-level teaching), or ‘a Cornish poet’ (since he indeed deeply loved the county), his ‘voice’ is simultaneously quite individual and recognisably universal. He loved landscapes, travel, music, art, history, myth and legend. And people, too: in all their mysterious varieties of life, pain, comedy and character. As the literary historian A. T. Tolley has noted, “Causley was one of the few poets to see the war continuously from the point of view of the lower ranks.” Farewell, Aggie Weston also has documentary importance since the poems incorporate a wealth of traditional and contemporary naval slang (much of which Causley explains in footnotes). Like Kipling fifty years earlier, Causley demonstrated that the best way to capture the true character of military men was to use their special language. This small volume provides a unique poetic record of the British navy in its last moment of imperial self-confidence. 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. 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.The Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2016". Give me challenge. 15 October 2016 . Retrieved 18 January 2017.

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.”prize – Claire Dyer, 'Trust and the Horse'. [19] [20] Judges: Antony Caleshu, Miriam Darlington, Kim Martindale and Ronald Tamplin. [21] 2016 [ edit ] Legacy [ edit ] Causley's grave in St Thomas Churchyard in Launceston, Cornwall, is barely 100 yards from where he was born 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.) Causley stayed true to what he called his 'guiding principle', adopted from Auden and others, that: "while there are some good poems which are only for adults, because they pre-suppose adult experience in their readers, there are no good poems which are only for children." 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.

The 2018 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 7 January 2019 . Retrieved 25 August 2020. 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] 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. Speaking to the BBC in 1979 Causley confessed that he had decided that if he survived the fighting he would devote his life to only doing the things he enjoyed. After completing his teacher training at Peterborough he returned to Launceston and remained at the school there until he retired in 1976.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. In 1952 Causley was made a bard of Gorsedh Kernow adopting the bardic name Morvardh (Sea poet). [6] In 1958 Causley was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and he was made a CBE in 1986. When he was 83 years old he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature: he greeted this award with the words, "My goodness, what an encouragement!" 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. Charles Causley Poetry Competition - Writing East Midlands". Writing East Midlands. Archived from the original on 18 January 2017 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. 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:

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. Laurence Green (2013), All Cornwall Thunders at My Door: A Biography of Charles Causley. Sheffield: The Cornovia Press, p. 173, ISBN 978-1-908878-08-3. 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.

Writing because you must . . .

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.