Charles causley biography

Charles Causley was born in Launceston in Cornwall, and spent most of his life there. His father died shortly after the 1st World War of a lung condition induced by the conditions under which he served in the trenches and Causley was brought up by his mother to whose care in her later life he devoted himself. He showed early literary interests and talent, reading widely in his teens and writing plays for local production and publication. His first play ‘Runaway’ was published when he was only nineteen.

After serving in the navy in the second world war (experiences from which he used as a basis for a selection of

short stories Hands to Dance and Skylark), he took advantage of the opportunities to train as a teacher afforded by the post-War Government and entered Peterborough Training College. On qualifying he returned to teach in the Primary School in his native Launceston and remained in post there until his early retirement.

His first published collection of poems was titled Farewell Aggie Weston and was published in the classic “slim volume” style by The Hand and Flower Press in 1951. Along with several companion volumes by other poets, this volume is now very collectable. This was followed by Survivor’s Leave (also by the Hand and Flower Press) in 1953, but his reputation was established in 1957 with the publication of Union Street by Rupert Hart-Davis. This volume contained an introduction by Edith Sitwell who was very enthusiastic about Causley’s poetry.

These early poems are noted for their narrative style and often contain strong spiritual and Christian references. In the 70s Causley started to write and publish poetry for children. Some are simple rhymes designed to delight readers by their very sound, but others follow his early style for a strong narra

English poet and educator (1917–2003)

Charles Stanley CausleyCBEFRSL (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a Cornish poet, school teacher and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic, especially when linked to his native Cornwall.

Early years

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.

Causley left school at 16, working as a clerk in a builder's office. 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.

Career and achievements

He enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1940 and served as an ordinary seaman during the Second World War, firstly aboard the destroyer HMS Eclipse in the Atlantic, at shore bases in Gibraltar and northwest England. Later he served in the Pacific on the aircraft carrier HMS Glory, after promotion to petty officer.

Causley later wrote about his wartime experiences (and their longer-term impact on him)

I have no idea if Charles Causley’s poetry is known to American readers but I suspect it isn’t, or only to scholars and other poets; to become internationally celebrated for poetry requires the kind of ambition he signally lacked. He was without question one of the most important British poets of the last century—utterly original, his working-class voice untainted by university and the dead weight of literary tradition it passes on, and abidingly popular without being populist.

A poet’s poet, his furious polemic about child neglect, Timothy Winters, remains among the most memorized of the poems the British learn at school; on a recent book tour I found I needed only recite the first two lines to any UK audience for a merry hubbub to break out as people joined forces to recite the rest back at me.

Eden Rock, his masterpiece evoking both grief for dead parents and intimations of mortality, rubs shoulders with Auden’s Funeral Blues, Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar and Clare Harner’s Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, in the forefront of those poems unthinkingly chosen as funeral readings or emailed to bereaved friends.

Causley’s reputation is in trouble, though, not through one of those posthumous scandals where a much loved writer is exposed as vile to women or collecting schoolgirl porn or whatever, but because of the efficiency with which he constructed an irreproachable public persona. Of our great poets, he less sexy even than Larkin. There are no drugs, no benders, no vendettas, no suicidal lovers, no lovers, indeed.

The facts of his remarkably unadventurous life are swiftly summarized: born in Launceston, a small town on the Cornish border, in 1917 to a Cornish mother and Devonian father who had met as servants, taken out of school at fifteen because his widowed mother needed him to work, a sailor in the Second World Wa

Charles Causley (1917-2003) was born and brought up in Launceston, Cornwall and lived there for most of his life. When he was only seven his father died from wounds sustained during the First World War. This early loss and his own experience of service in the Second World War affected Causley deeply. His work fell outside the main poetic trends of the 20th century, drawing instead on native sources of inspiration: folk songs, hymns, and above all, ballads. His poetry was recognised by the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1971. In addition to these public honours, the clarity and formality of his poetry has won Causley a popular readership, making him, in the words of Ted Hughes, one of the “best loved and most needed” poets of the last fifty years.

Causley’s mastery of traditional forms imparts a timeless quality to his poetry, the voice of which is more often communal than personal. So it’s possible to imagine narratives such as ‘Miller’s End’ being recited round a fireside a hundred or more years ago. This traditionalism has sometimes obscured the daring of his imagery, a visionary quality as strange and intense as one of his acknowledged masters, William Blake. Like Blake, a central concern is the fall from innocence to experience and it’s not surprising children feature constantly in Causley’s poetry, including the much anthologised ‘Timothy Winters’. Indeed Causley wrote some of his finest poems for children and saw no distinction between these two strands of his work. Perhaps Causley’s ability to retain a child-like openness in part explains the freshness of his writing: unlike the narrator of ‘The Lunatic Boy’, Causley never lost his vision of a world where “Houses put on leaves, water rang.”

Given the oral roots of some of his favourite forms, it’s immensely valuable to be able to listen to Causley