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Charles Causley

Charles Causley, CBE (24 August 1917 – 4 November 2003) was a Cornish poet and writer. His work is noted for its simplicity and directness, for its concerns with Christianity, and for its associations with his native Cornwall.

Biography

Causley was born in Launceston in Cornwall and was educated there and in Peterborough. An office boy at sixteen (forced to leave school at the death of his father), he served in the Navy during the World War II, as a coder, an experience he later wrote about in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance. His first collection of poems, Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951) contained his Song of the Dying Gunner A.A.1, which made an immediate impression: 'Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks, at Guz,/ Hang my tiddley suit on the door/ I'm sewn up neat in a canvas sheet/ And I shan't be home no more.' Survivor's Leave followed in 1953, and from then until his death Causley published regularly. He worked as a teacher at a school in Launceston, leaving the town seldom and reluctantly, though he twice spent time in Perth as a visiting Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and especially after his retirement was much in demand at poetry readings in the United Kingdom. He made many broadcasts.

An intensely private person, he was nevertheless always approachable, and became a close friend of writers as diverse as Siegfried Sassoon, A. L. Rowse, Jack Clemo and Ted Hughes (his closest friend). His poems for children were extremely popular, and he used to say that he could have lived comfortably on the fees paid for the reproduction of only one of them, Timothy Winters: 'Timothy Winters comes to school/ With eyes as wide as a football pool/ Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters/ A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.' In 1958, Causley was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE in 1986. When he was 83 years old he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature - an award he greeted with the words, 'My goodness, what an encouragement!'Other awards include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1971. In 1973 - 1974 he was Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Exeter, receiving an honorary doctorate from that university. He was presented with the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in 2000. Between 1962 and 1966 he was a member of the Poetry Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was twice awarded a travelling scholarship by the Society of Authors. He won the Heywood Hill Prize. There was a campaign, unsuccessful, to have him appointed Poet Laureate on the death of Betjeman. 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. His work is intensely original (though influenced to an extent by W. H. Auden) and many consider him, like John Betjeman to be a man working outside of the dominant trends of the poetry of his day. Because of this, academia has paid less attention to his work than it might. His popularity, particularly among the Cornish, remains relatively high.

According to the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, "[b]ecause 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 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." (Zipes et al.: 1253). W. H. Auden comments on Causley stating that "Causley stayed true to what he called his 'guiding principle'....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." (Zipes et al.: 1253).