Timothy Corsellis | |
|---|---|
 Corsellis in 1938 | |
| Born | Timothy John Manley Corsellis 27 January 1921 Eltham, London, England |
| Died | 10 October 1941 (aged 20) Annan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland |
| Resting place | Oxford Crematorium |
| Occupation | Air raid warden then a pilot with Air Transport Auxiliary (Service Number 625) |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | St. Clare Preparatory School, Walmer, Kent |
| Alma mater | Winchester College |
Timothy Corsellis (27 January 1921 – 10 October 1941) was an English poet of World War II.
Timothy John Manley Corsellis was born on 27 January 1921 in Eltham, London, the third of the four children of Helen (née Bendall) and Douglas Corsellis. [1] His father had lost a fore-arm at Gallipoli, but went on to become a prosperous barrister and learnt to fly his own light aircraft. Timothy went to St. Clare preparatory school in Walmer, Kent, where John Magee, the author of "High Flight" was a contemporary and Henry Bentinck became a friend. After his father's death in an air crash in 1930, Timothy was sent to Winchester College, where he contributed poems to the school magazine and fenced. [2]
Leaving school to start work as an articled clerk in the Town Clerk's office in Wandsworth, he divided his evenings between work as a resident volunteer at the Crown and Manor Club, [3] a Winchester College Settlement in Hoxton, East London and entertainment in Fitzrovia, where he earned money for drinks by "conjuring", a talent which earned him the right of entry into the exclusive Magic Circle.
Strongly marked by the failure of the Munich Agreement, Corsellis registered in April 1939 as a conscientious objector on religious grounds. When war broke out he became an ARP warden. [4] After Dunkirk, he volunteered for training as a fighter pilot. His initial training in Torquay and Carlisle [5] did not prepare him for his assignment to Bomber Command, an assignment which in January 1941 he refused, on the grounds that his conscience would not permit him to take part in the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. [6] His request to join Fighter Command was met with an honourable discharge from the RAF and his application to join the Fleet Air Arm was ignored, but he was accepted by the Air Transport Auxiliary, which ferried aircraft from factory to operational squadrons. From January to July 1941, at the height of the Blitz, he worked as a full-time ARP warden, and then he began his ATA training at White Waltham in August 1941. On 10 October 1941, the aircraft Corsellis was flying stalled and crashed over Annan in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. [7] He was 20 years old. [8]
At the time of his death Corsellis was just beginning to break into London literary circles, and in death he was not forgotten. Keidrych Rhys [9] and Patricia Ledward [10] wrote elegies for him, and included some of his poems in their anthologies, Poems from the Forces, [11] ' More Poems from the Forces [12] and Poems of This War by Younger Poets. [13] As John Sutherland [14] recounts, Stephen Spender, for whom Corsellis had found war work in Wandsworth, was haunted by his sudden disappearance, and his penultimate poem, dated 1941/1995 was dedicated to "Timothy Corsellis". [15] The American anthologist Oscar Williams championed his work, [16] and an American poet and former war pilot, Simon Perchik, has paid him tribute. [17] In 2004 the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography took a first step in establishing a literary canon of World War 2 poets by including nine: Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller, John Pudney, Henry Reed, Frank Thompson and Corsellis. Ronald Blythe wrote a moving account of his life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , [18] while critics as well known as Andrew Sinclair [19] and D.S.R. Welland [20] have singled out his work.
In 2012, Helen Goethals's The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis [21] made available for the first time a hundred of his poems, arranged to bring out their "unique literary and historical interest". Two reviews put them into context: those of Martyn Halsall in the Church Times [22] – "This study assists the debate on war poetry from 1939 to 1945" – and Ralph Townsend in The Trusty Servant [23] – "The place of Corsellis among the Second War poets of England is established in the anthologies. Here additional poems ... which have not before gone into print present him as an example of a young man whose education led him to take an independent moral view of things ...".
In 2014, the introduction to a War Words poetry reading by Andrew Eaton stated that "The First and Second World Wars inspired gifted writers from Wilfred Owen to Timothy Corsellis to commit to paper their personal wartime narratives. These texts, often graphic and harrowing, have gone on to become parts of the world's cultural fabric.". [24]
Also in 2014 the Poetry Society, supported by the War Poets Association and the Imperial War Museums, launched its Timothy Corsellis Prize Competition for a poem responding to the Second World War. This was directed at young poets all over the world aged 14–25, and was for a poem responding to the life and/or work of Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, John Jarmain, Henry Reed or Timothy Corsellis, with a short comment (300 words) explaining how the competitor responded to one or more of them. The competition will be repeated annually for at least 5 years. [25]
When I was a civilian I hoped high
Dreamt my future cartwheels in the sky
Almost forgot to arm myself
Against the boredom and the inefficiency
The petty injustice and the everlasting grudges
The sacrifice is greater than I ever expected.
from "What I never saw" (January 24, 1941)
Under this pile of fallen masonry
Under those spillikins of beams
Where number thirty two lies shattered
There may be a body
Dig
For there may be a body.
Distorted corpse once breathed slum air
Lived in the grey dust where it died;
Is it for this that bending we strived
And fought in other's blood and other's sorrow
To reach these wretched mangled remains?
Is it for this that we ached in the darkness
Not knowing that nearby
Another house had fallen
To the blast of that same bomb.
Sweat fell, we were not the strong and young
They were out training, preparing,
We are the best of those remaining
We are the mellow and the hardened
And though our backs are hard of bending
Under aloofness our souls bend rending
The sorrow out of the bereaved father's breast
Tearing it out and holding it in our own hands
Adopting it to our own bodies
Caring for the children we had never seen
Sometimes we pray to be hardened and callous
But God turns a deaf ear
And we know hate and sorrow,
Intimately
And we do not mind dying tomorrow.
from "Dawn after the raid" (April 20, 1941)
I will not sing the song of others
In other people's words;
I will not see the world of others
Through other people's eyes.
But blue, far into space,
I'll hurl my judgment of the human race
Upwards to the unassuming sky,
Farther than any bird can fly.
from "It is not you, pale lonely star" (August 22, 1941)
And for the gifts that you can proffer
Hope and love and power and pride
Take from me all I can offer
Weakness and some words beside.
from "The gifts" (August 28, 1941)
Alun Lewis was a Welsh poet. He is one of the best-known English-language war poets of the Second World War. His poetry centers around a "recurring obsession with the themes of isolation and death."
The Uranians were a late-19th-century and early-20th-century clandestine group of up to several dozen male homosexual poets and prose writers who principally wrote on the subject of the love of adolescent boys. In a strict definition they were an English literary and cultural movement; in a broader definition there were also American Uranians. The movement reached its peak between the late 1880s and mid 1890s, but has been regarded as stretching between 1858, when William Johnson Cory's poetry collection Ionica appeared, and 1930, the year of publication of Samuel Elsworth Cottam's Cameos of Boyhood and Other Poems and of E. E. Bradford's last collection, Boyhood.
Michael Roberts, originally named William Edward Roberts, was an English poet, writer, scientist, mathematician, critic and broadcaster, a true polymath who made his living as a teacher.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
Evelyn ('Lynette') Beatrice Roberts was a Welsh poet and novelist. Her poems were about war, landscape, and life in the small Welsh village where she lived. She published two poetry collections: Poems (1944) and Gods with Stainless Ears: A Heroic Poem (1951). Roberts' work was admired by many poets, including: T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Robert Graves. In later life, Roberts had a mental breakdown and stopped publishing. Her work was largely forgotten for the remainder of her life. She died in 1995.
John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs was an English poet and translator. He is known for verse influenced by classical myths, and for a long Arthurian poem, Artorius (1972).
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. "Richard Eberhart emerged out of the 1930s as a modern stylist with romantic sensibilities." He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, 1930–1965 and the 1977 National Book Award for Poetry for Collected Poems, 1930–1976. He was the grandfather of former Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington.
Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist. In the 1930s he was editor of the influential magazine New Verse, and went on to produce 13 collections of his own poetry, as well as compiling numerous anthologies, among many published works on subjects including art, travel and the countryside. Grigson exhibited in the London International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries in 1936, and in 1946 co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Grigson's autobiography The Crest on the Silver was published in 1950. At various times he was involved in teaching, journalism and broadcasting. Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies.
Oscar Kaplan, known by his pen name Oscar Williams, was an American anthologist and poet.
John Sleigh Pudney was a British poet, journalist and author. He was known especially for his popular poetry written during the Second World War, but he also wrote novels, short stories and children's fiction. His broad-ranging non-fiction, often commissioned, served as his primary source of income.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American is an anthology of poetry, edited by Oscar Williams, which was published by Scribner's, New York, in 1946, and Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, in 1947. Another edition, enlarged and rearranged, was published in 1952.
Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965.
Wales was an English-language literary journal, published from 1937 to 1949 and from 1958 to 1960. The magazine contained fiction, poetry, reviews and articles pertaining to Wales.
Farley Mount is a hill and one of the highest points in Hampshire. It is located within Farley Mount Country Park, situated about four miles west of the historic city of Winchester, Hampshire. It is locally famous for being the subject of a folk song, 'On Farley Mount'. It featured the line oh on Farley Mount the clouds drift by, rustling the trees, on Farley mount I wonder why, what troubles you and I, blue is the sky and so are your eyes, oh left alone on Farley Mount. It is believed to date back to at least the sixteenth century and is still sung in pubs in the area.
Bertram Warr was a Canadian poet and a sergeant in the RAFVR, who was lost in action during World War II over Essen, Germany in April 1943.
SurVision is an international English-language surrealist poetry project, comprising an online magazine and a book-publishing outlet. SurVision magazine, founded in March 2017 by poet Anatoly Kudryavitsky, is a platform for surrealist poetry from Ireland and the world. SurVision Books, the book imprint, started up the following year.
Cuthbert Vail Wright was an American literary critic, writer, poet, and educator.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
