In “Cowboy Song,” another young man, bereft of family knows he will be murdered before his next birthday. In “Recruiting Drive,” for example, Causley uses the imagery of a bird that lures young men to their deaths in battle.īut the terrible toy of my lily-white boy “From childhood, then,” he remarked years later, “it had been made perfectly clear to me that war was something more than the exciting fiction one read about in books or saw on films.” And the memories of war would be seared in many of his poems, which combine innocence with the hard experience of war, suffering, and death. He also watched the terrifying behavior of the shell-shocked soldiers who wandered through his native town. An only child, Causley spent his first seven years watching his father slowly die. His father, who had served as a private soldier in France, returned from the Great War a consumptive invalid. Although he was too young to have any direct memories of World War I, it profoundly shaped his childhood. Causley was born in 1917 in the Cornish market town of Launceston where, except for six years of military service, he has lived ever since. There is no better way to approach Causley’s poetry than through his life, because few modern poets have been so meaningfully rooted in one time and place.

Yet, his accomplishments go far beyond the ballad, for Causley mastered an impressive variety of forms and styles, and the true unity of his body of work depends less on a specific allegiance to any single form than on his commitment to certain old-fashioned virtues of English poetry such as simplicity, clarity, grace, and compassion. In this, he is on common ground with the likes of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, who share a passion for the lyricism of traditional meters, though all three could write superbly in free verse when the occasion demands. Indeed, he is the most famous English poet of songs, an achievement many critics would consider less a distinction than a disability. Rather than follow the path of the Modernist movement, Causley’s work harks back to an older, more English roots, taking his inspiration from folk songs, hymns and especially ballads.

Causley is a ‘modern poet’ (he died only in 2003) but there is nothing avant-garde about his poetry. But in my opinion, he deserves to be more widely read. ~ Last lines of Causley’s great poem, “I am the Great Sun” (more below)Ĭharles Causley is a poet that even many poetry lovers have forgotten.

Causley poet