The simplicity of the poems in Figgie Hobbin reveals his method more clearly. Their clarity and grace epitomize the transparent style that he has striven for throughout his career. As he has reminded readers, “The mere fact of a poem appearing simple in language and construction bears no relation whatsoever to the profundity of ideas it may contain.” The meaning of many apparently simple poems is rich and complex, just as the underlying meaning of an overtly difficult poem may be crude and banal. The direct and uncomplicated voice that speaks in Causley’s children’s verse is traditional in the most radical sense. Causley has so thoroughly assimilated certain traditions of English verse that he uses them naturally to translate personal experiences into a common utterance. There is no gap between the demands of private sensibility and the resources of a public style. His work achieves the lucid impersonality of folk song or ballad. In “Who?” for example, Causley’s vision of his lost childhood remains equally authentic on either a personal or universal level: 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.” 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. The poem ends with an ambiguous last line, open to interpretation, about the nature of life and dying.

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. 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. Other awards include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1971. In 1973/74 he was visiting fellow in poetry at the University of Exeter, from which institution he received an honorary doctorate on 7 July 1977. [7] 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.) 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 . . .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 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.

Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2015 – Josephine Corcoran". josephinecorcoran.org . Retrieved 18 January 2017. International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 9 December 2021 . Retrieved 9 December 2021. Early in the Morning: A Collection of New Poems (1986), with music by Anthony Castro and illustrations by Michael Foreman

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Charles Causley Poetry Competition Winners". Literature Works SW - Nurturing literature development activity in South West England. 22 January 2015 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Compare these two stanzas from Blake’s “London” with the opening of Causley’s “At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux”: 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. 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.

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 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. 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. International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 30 March 2020 . Retrieved 25 August 2020.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. prize – Claire Dyer, 'Trust and the Horse'. [19] [20] Judges: Antony Caleshu, Miriam Darlington, Kim Martindale and Ronald Tamplin. [21] 2016 [ edit ] Twenty-Five Poems by Hamdija Demirovic (1980), translated with the author from the original Yugoslavian