The Poet

CHARLES CAUSLEY

Charles Causley was born in Launceston, a small town in the north of Cornwall, England, and with the exception of military service and travel, he never lived anywhere else. His poetry is filled with images of the sea and coastal life, with references to local legends and ballads. The son of a gardener and a domestic servant, Charles attended a local grammar school on scholarship. Precocious in his literary talent, he began his first novel at the age of nine. At fifteen he left school to become a laborer, but despite being cut off from a formal education Causley continued writing and reading poetry. Throughout his career as a poet, Causley wrote against the grain, preferring lyric ballads and descriptive, narrative poems with a style and form that recalled nineteenth-century poetry. He used traditional rhyme and meter in contrast to the experimentation of the modernist poets who were his contemporaries. Because of these qualities, Natalie Merchant found his poems became lyrics very naturally.

A frequent theme in Causley’s poetry is war and its aftermath. During his boyhood in Cornwall he was surrounded by many sick, injured, and traumatized soldiers returning home from the First World War. When Charles was only seven, his own father died a slow and painful death of complications from tuberculosis contracted in the trenches. Causley himself served in the Royal Navy during World War II for six years. Witnessing the deaths of his friends and comrades had a profound effect on his literary path. Although he published a novel based on his wartime experiences, his reaction to war caused him to turn away from drama and prose and to concentrate on poetry. His first collection of verse, Farewell, Aggie Weston, was published in 1951. It was in this volume of work that his poem “Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience” first appeared. Many such poems by Causley are deceptively simple; he believed that a poem didn’t need to be complicated or abstract in order to be complex. He once explained, “The mere fact of a poem appearing simple in language and construction bears no relation whatsoever to the profundity of ideas it may contain.”