Timothy Corsellis

Quality 0.50 · 0 views · Updated 2 months ago

English poet

title: "Timothy Corsellis" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1921-births", "1941-deaths", "20th-century-english-male-writers", "20th-century-english-poets", "air-transport-auxiliary-pilots", "aviators-killed-in-aviation-accidents-or-incidents-in-scotland", "british-civilians-killed-in-world-war-ii", "people-educated-at-winchester-college", "royal-air-force-pilots-of-world-war-ii", "victims-of-aviation-accidents-or-incidents-in-1941", "world-war-ii-poets", "english-conscientious-objectors", "civil-defence-service-personnel"] description: "English poet" topic_path: "history" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Corsellis" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary English poet ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox writer"]

FieldValue
nameTimothy Corsellis
imageTimothy John Manley Corsellis.jpg
captionCorsellis in 1938
birth_nameTimothy John Manley Corsellis
birth_date
birth_placeEltham, London, England
death_date
death_placeAnnan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
resting_placeOxford Crematorium
occupationAir raid warden then a pilot with Air Transport Auxiliary (Service Number 625)
nationalityBritish
educationSt. Clare Preparatory School, Walmer, Kent
alma_materWinchester College
::

| name = Timothy Corsellis | image = Timothy John Manley Corsellis.jpg | image_size = | alt = | caption = Corsellis in 1938 | pseudonym = | birth_name = Timothy John Manley Corsellis | birth_date = | birth_place = Eltham, London, England | death_date = | death_place = Annan, Dumfriesshire, Scotland | resting_place = Oxford Crematorium | occupation = Air raid warden then a pilot with Air Transport Auxiliary (Service Number 625) | nationality = British | ethnicity = | citizenship = | education = St. Clare Preparatory School, Walmer, Kent | alma_mater = Winchester College | period = | genre = | subject = | movement = | notableworks = | spouse = | partner = | children = | relatives = | influences = | influenced = | awards = | signature = | signature_alt = | website = | portaldisp = Timothy Corsellis (27 January 1921 – 10 October 1941) was an English poet of World War II.

Early life

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. 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.

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, 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.

Wartime experience

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. After Dunkirk, he volunteered for training as a fighter pilot. His initial training in Torquay and Carlisle 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. 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. He was 20 years old.

Literary life

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 and Patricia Ledward wrote elegies for him, and included some of his poems in their anthologies, Poems from the Forces,' More Poems from the Forces and Poems of This War by Younger Poets. As John Sutherland 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". The American anthologist Oscar Williams championed his work, and an American poet and former war pilot, Simon Perchik, has paid him tribute. 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, while critics as well known as Andrew Sinclair and D.S.R. Welland have singled out his work.

In 2012, Helen Goethals's The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis 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 – "This study assists the debate on war poetry from 1939 to 1945" – and Ralph Townsend in The Trusty Servant – "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.".

Legacy

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, with a short comment (300 words) explaining how the competitor responded to one or more of them. The competition was to be repeated annually for at least 5 years.

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Montagu_Mansions,Marylebone-geograph.org.uk-_1879553.jpg" caption="Montagu Mansions, Marylebone"] ::

Corsellis was one of a number of residents of Montagu Mansions, in the Marylebone district of London, featured in the fifth series of the BBC Television history series, A House Through Time.

The site of his air crash is marked with a commemorative stone.

Excerpts from poems

::quote

::

|source=from "What I never saw" (January 24, 1941) |width = 35% |align = center |quoted = 1 |quote=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.

::quote

::

|source=from "Dawn after the raid" (April 20, 1941) |width = 35% |align = center |quoted = 1 |quote=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.

::quote

::

|source=from "It is not you, pale lonely star" (August 22, 1941) |width = 35% |align = center |quoted = 1 |quote=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.

::quote

::

|source=from "The gifts" (August 28, 1941) |width = 35% |align = center |quoted = 1 |quote=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.

Bibliography

  • Keidrych Rhys (ed.), Poems from the Forces, Routledge, 1941
  • – More Poems from the Forces, Routledge, 1943
  • Patricia Ledward & Colin Strang (ed.), Poems of this War by Younger Poets, Cambridge University Press, 1942
  • Robert Herring (ed.), Life and Letters Today, 1942
  • John Pudney & Henry Treece (ed.), Air Force Poetry, Bodley Head, 1944
  • Oscar Williams (ed.),War Poet's, New York, John Day Company, 1945
  • Oscar Williams (ed.), A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, New York, Scribner & Sons, 1946
  • Oscar Williams (ed.), A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, Routledge, 1947
  • Stephen Spender, World Within World, Harcourt, Brace, 1951.
  • Ronald Blythe (ed.), Components of the Scene: An Anthology of Stories, Poems and Essays from the Second World War, Penguin Books, 1966
  • Brian Gardner (ed.), The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945, Methuen, 1966.
  • Charles Hamblett (ed.), I Burn for England: An Anthology of the Poetry of World War II, Frewin, 1966
  • Andrew Sinclair (ed.), The War Decade: An Anthology of the 1940s, Hamish Hamilton, 1989
  • – War like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the 1940s, Hamish Hamilton, 1989
  • Victor Selwyn (ed.), Poems of the Second World War, Dent, Everyman's Library, 1985
  • – The Voice of War, Michael Joseph, 1995
  • Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Oxford University Press, 1989
  • Gordon Mursell, English Spirituality: From 1700 to the Present Day, John Knox Press, 2001
  • Martin Barraclough (ed.), Give Me the Wings: A Celebration of English Aviation Poetry, Words by Design, 2012
  • Helen Goethals, The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

References

References

  1. "Timothy John Manley Corsellis". Webrarian.
  2. Goethals, Helen. (2012). "The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis". Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  3. Leslie, Ian. "History of the Crown and Manor Club". online extract from a unpublished memoir.
  4. Williams, Oscar. (1945). "The War Poets". John Day Company.
  5. Fussell, Paul. (1989). "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War". Oxford University Press.
  6. Ferrar, Marcus. (20 December 2011). "Timothy Corsellis – a war poet's struggle with conscience".
  7. "A.T.A. Casualties". The RAF Lichfield Association.
  8. Connell, Tim. (8 July 2011). "Review of Mervyn Peake". Times Literary Supplement.
  9. Rhys, Keidrych. (1942). "The Van Pool and Other Poems". Routledge.
  10. Colin Strang and, Patricia Ledward. (1947). "Retrospect 1939–1942". Falcon Press.
  11. Rhys, Keidrych. (1941). "Poems from the Forces". Routledge.
  12. Rhys, Keidrych. (1942). "More Poems from the Forces". Routledge.
  13. Colin Strang and, Patricia Ledward. (1942). "Poems of this War by Younger Poets". Cambridge University Press.
  14. Sutherland, John. (2004). "Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography". Viking.
  15. Spender, Stephen. (2004). "New Collected Poems". Faber and Faber.
  16. Williams, Oscar. (1945). "The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century". John Day Company.
  17. Perchik, Simon. (2008). "Hands Collected". Pavement Saw Press.
  18. Blythe, Ronald. "Timothy Corsellis". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
  19. Sinclair, Andrew. (1989). "The War Decade". Hamish Hamilton.
  20. Welland, D.S.R.. (1987). "The United States: A Companion to American Studies". Taylor and Francis.
  21. Goethals, Helen. (2012). "The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis". Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  22. Halsall, Martyn. (21 December 2012). "Poet of Blitz and Home Front". Church Times.
  23. Townsend, Ralph. (November 2012). "Book review". The Trusty Servant.
  24. "War Words: poetry inspired by the First and Second World Wars". PRONI, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
  25. "The First Annual Timothy Corsellis Prize". Poetry Society.
  26. (2024). "Episode 3".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

1921-births1941-deaths20th-century-english-male-writers20th-century-english-poetsair-transport-auxiliary-pilotsaviators-killed-in-aviation-accidents-or-incidents-in-scotlandbritish-civilians-killed-in-world-war-iipeople-educated-at-winchester-collegeroyal-air-force-pilots-of-world-war-iivictims-of-aviation-accidents-or-incidents-in-1941world-war-ii-poetsenglish-conscientious-objectorscivil-defence-service-personnel