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. International Poetry Competition Results". The Charles Causley Trust. 30 March 2020 . Retrieved 25 August 2020.

The visionary mode has its greatest range of expression in Causley’s religious poetry. No reader of Farewell, Aggie Weston would have guessed that its author would become one of the few contemporary Christian poets of genuine distinction. Yet the new poems in Union Street confirmed Causley’s transformation from veteran to visionary. The devotional sonnet, “I Am the Great Sun,” which opens the section of new poems reveals a more overtly compassionate side to Christianity than found in Survivor’s Leave. Here Christ speaking from the cross (the poem was inspired by a seventeenth-century Norman crucifix) announces his doomed love for man: 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. [1]According to the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, [11] "because 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 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." [11] The Charles Causley International Poetry Prize is administered by the Causley Trust and is open to anyone over the age of 18. It began in 2013 and has continued in most years since, with a steadily-increasing number of entries. There are a number of monetary prizes and a good deal of publicity for the prize-winning poets and those achieving honourable mentions.

After demobilisation in 1946, he took advantage of a government scheme to train as a teacher at Peterborough. He then worked full-time as a teacher at his old school for over 35 years, teaching for his very final year at St. Catherine's CofE Primary elsewhere in the town, where the National School had been relocated. He twice spent time in Perth as a visiting Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and also worked at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada. Music at the festival has included regular appearances from Causley's distant relative, folk singer Jim Causley. featuring his settings of Causley poems, some of which have been recorded for commercial CDs. 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. One of Causley’s most famous poems, By St Thomas Water, conjures up his childhood self playing in the churchyard in Launceston where both he and his mother now rest side by side. The poem, dreamy and nostalgic, has Charles and his playmate Jessie fishing with jam-jars but also refers to a local superstition. There is a stone outside the church door that the children would put their ears against to hear the dead talking. 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.In 1958, Charles Causley was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), and was awarded a CBE in 1986. Amongst a number of other other awards, he was given the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967, and was presented with the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in 2000, when he characteristically exclaimed (at the age of 83), “Goodness! What an encouragement!”. With the collections of poetry that followed ‘Survivor’s Leave’ and ‘Union Street’ his reputation was firmly established and in 1958 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His close friend the poet Ted Hughes said: Charles Causley (1917-2003) was born and brought up in Launceston, Cornwall and lived there for most of his life. His father died in the First World War when he was only seven and this, as well as his own experiences in the Second World War, affected him deeply. His poems draw inspiration from folk songs, hymns, and above all, ballads. His poetry was recognised by the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1967 and his poetry is popular with everyone, making him, in the words of Ted Hughes, one of the “best loved and most needed” poets of the last fifty years. The collection Survivor's Leave followed in 1953, and from then until his death Causley published frequently, in magazines, in his own volumes and shared ones, in anthologies and then in several editions of his Collected Poems.

If Causley’s loyalty to the ballad form appears a conspicuous anachronism, so, too, does his reliance on public subjects, historical material, and the narrative mode. He has been in almost every sense an outsider to the mainstream of contemporary poetry. His historical ballads in particular not only reject the metrical conventions of mid-century poetry (a tuneful stanza too simple for sophisticated formalists and too traditional for progressives), they also reject the notion that a poet creates a private reality in the context of his or her own poems. No private mythologies now for Causley. His work makes its appeal to a common reality outside the poem–usually an objectively verifiable reality of history or geography. Causley’s public is no ideological abstraction; his ideal readers are local and concrete–the Cornish. His regionalism grows naturally out of his aesthetic. The public nature of this imaginative gesture is also reinforced by Causley’s habitual measure, the ballad, the most popular and accessible form in English. After training in Plymouth and Lincolnshire, he joined the destroyer HMS Eclipse at Scapa Flow as an Ordinary Seaman Coder. Convoy escort duties took him to West Africa, and then Gibraltar, transferring to the shore base for service around the Med (where Eclipse later sank, with heavy losses). Rising to Petty Officer Coder, Causley joined the new carrier HMS Glory at Belfast, sailing to the Pacific. He was demobilised in 1946, chose to train as a teacher, and returned to teach in his old school for nearly 30 years. Legacy [ edit ] Causley's grave in St Thomas Churchyard in Launceston, Cornwall, is barely 100 yards from where he was bornCausley was born at Launceston in Cornwall and was educated there and in Peterborough. His father died in 1924 from long-standing injuries from the First World War. Causley had to leave school at 15 to earn money, working as an office boy during his early years. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, as a coder, an experience he later wrote about in a book of short stories, Hands to Dance and Skylark.