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. Most critics also missed the unexpected direction signaled by the twenty-three new poems in the collection. While continuing to employ rhyme and meter, Causley returned to free verse for the first time since Farewell, Aggie Weston. This shift opened his work to new effects while liberating his talent for description. In “Ten Types of Hospital Visitor,” which opens the “New Poems” section of his Collected Poems, Causley creates a detailed panorama of hospital life which unexpectedly modulates from realism to visionary fancy. In “Ward 14” Causley uses free verse to achieve painful directness in his description of a man visiting his old, brain-damaged mother in the hospital. These poems demonstrate a richness of depiction and high degree of psychological naturalism not often found in Causley’s earlier work. They also reveal the increasingly autobiographic interests that will characterize his later work. While mastering new techniques, however, Causley did not jettison traditional form. He ends the Collected Poems with several formal poems, most notably “A Wedding Portrait,” one of his most important poems of self-definition. Here the poet’s past and present, innocence and experience, are literally embodied in the scene of his middle-aged self looking at his parents’ wedding photograph. His doomed father and mother appear innocently hopeful in the portrait while the adult poet knows the subsequent pain they will undergo. His present knowledge cannot help them escape their plight, and he remains cut off from them now by time and death as absolutely as he was nonexistent to them on their wedding day. In a visionary moment Causley looks to his art to bridge the gap to time and restore his dead parents to him and his lost childhood self to them. The 1975 Collected Poems ends with the affirmation of poetry’s power to triumph over death: From the late 1960s, Causley published poetry for children. Some are simple rhymes designed to delight younger readers mainly by their sound alone, while others carefully observe of people, the world and life, and tell strong stories. Many of these books were illustrated by prominent artists. Causley always agreed with the view that “there are no good poems for children that are only for children”, and indeed there is some overlap between his Collected Poems (several editions, the last of those coming out in 2001) and his Collected Poems for Children (1996). Causley’s writing has many tones: not just sombre or portentous. His poetry – comic, magical, mischievous, mystical, spiritual (and spirited) by turns – has impressive technical skill, much learning lightly worn, and an unfailing instinct for coining an image or a turn of phrase.

His first collection of poems, Farewell, Aggie Weston [1] (1951) contained his Song of the Dying Gunner A.A.1:

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From boyhood Causley intended to be an author. He began a novel at the age of nine and continued writing in a desultory fashion throughout his education at Launceston College. At fifteen, however, Causley quit school to begin working. He spent seven gloomy years first as a clerk in a builder’s office and later working for a local electrical supply company. This period of isolation would have destroyed most aspiring young writers, but in Causley’s case, it proved decisive. Cut off from institutionalized intellectual life, he developed in the only way available–as an autodidact. “As far as poetry goes,” Causley has commented on these formative years, “I’m self-educated. I read very randomly, I read absolutely everything.” He also experimented–with poetry, fiction, and most successfully with drama. In the late 1930s he published three one-act plays. During the same period Causley also played piano in a four-piece dance band, an experience which may have influenced his later predilection for writing poems in popular lyric forms such as the ballad. 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 Do you know, if I didn’t write poetry, I think I’d explode. All poetry is magic. It is a spell against insensitivity, failure of imagination, ignorance and barbarism. – Charles Causley. Perhaps because of that widespread perception of Causley as a poetic 'outsider', academia has so far paid less attention to his work than it might have done. However, the publication over recent years of a book of critical essays edited by Michael Hanke, Through the Granite Kingdom, as well as a number of dissertations about Causley's work (alone, or alongside poets such as Larkin and R. S. Thomas) suggest that this situation is changing.

His poetry frequently refers to Cornwall and its legends, and Causley was recognised by being made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1955. His scope and interests, however, stretched far beyond his native county. In addition, many poems relate to fellow writers like Keats, Clare, Lorca, Day-Lewis, Clemo, Betjeman and to artists he admired: Van Gogh, Samuel Palmer and Maxim Gorky, as well as the sculptor of local East Cornish origin, Nevill Northey Burnard. First and foremost Causley was a poet of place. He called Cornwall ‘the granite kingdom’ and always recognised and revelled in its unique qualities. Much of his work has a Cornish flavour, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes wistful, whimsical even but always celebrating Cornwall’s history, legends and its elemental landscape. Causley at 70 (Peterloo Poets, 1987 – ed. Harry Chambers): a collection of 25 poetry and prose tributes from other writers, plus 9 items of archival material, unpublished autobiographical fragments, etc., by Causley, and a bibliography; ISBN 978-0905291895 An art exhibition entitled 'Charles Causley: A Tribute from the Artists' was organised to coincide with Causley's 70th birthday in 1987 by Ron Tamplin of Exeter University, and featured a wide range of paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures. It later transferred from the University to the Institute of Education in Russell Square, London, for a period; an illustrated catalogue was published. Union Street (1957) secured Causley’s reputation as an important contemporary poet. Published with a preface by Edith Sitwell, then at the height of her influence, Union Street collected the best poems from Causley’s first two volumes and added nineteen new ones, including two of his finest poems ever, “I Am the Great Sun” and “At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux,” the last of which Sitwell singled out for particular praise. In her preface, Sitwell placed Causley’s work in its proper historical perspective–English folk song and ballad. While Sitwell praised Causley’s traditional roots, she also noted his “strange individuality.” Like most of Causley’s admirers, however, Sitwell had difficulty in explaining the particular appeal of his work. To express her approval, she repeatedly resorted to vague exclamations of delight, such as “beautiful,”“deeply moving,” and “enchanting.” While these terms describe in some general way the effect Causley’s poetry has on a sympathetic reader, they are so subjective that they shed little light on the special nature of his literary achievement. Unfortunately, Sitwell’s response typifies Causley’s critical reception. His admirers have felt more comfortable in writing appreciations of his work than in examining it in critical terms. The truly “strange individuality” that makes Causley a significant and original artist rather than a faux naif has never been adequately explained. This situation has given most critics the understandable but mistaken impression that while Causley’s poetry may be enjoyed, it is too simple to bear serious analysis. Dana Gioia and Charles Causley, 1984

The Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2016". Give me challenge. 15 October 2016 . Retrieved 18 January 2017. Charles Causley Poetry Competition 2015 – Josephine Corcoran". josephinecorcoran.org . Retrieved 18 January 2017. 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. 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. Charles Causley: Theatre Works (Alan M. Kent, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2013); ISBN 978-1903427774