Timothy Corsellis

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.{{cite web|title=Timothy John Manley Corsellis|publisher=Webrarian|url=http://www.webrarian.co.uk/individual.php?pid=I12751&ged=goddard|accessdate=27 May 2013}} 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.{{cite book|last=Goethals|first=Helen|title=The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis|year=2012|publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing|isbn=978-1-4438-3975-4|pages=5–19|url=http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438-3975-4-sample.pdf|access-date=26 August 2012|archive-date=3 December 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131203014128/http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438-3975-4-sample.pdf|url-status=dead}}

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,{{cite web|last=Leslie|first=Ian|title=History of the Crown and Manor Club|url=http://www.crownandmanor.org.uk/crownandmanor_064.htm|publisher=online extract from a unpublished memoir|accessdate=26 August 2012|archive-date=14 July 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130714123513/http://www.crownandmanor.org.uk/crownandmanor_064.htm|url-status=dead}} 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.{{cite book|last=Williams|first=Oscar|title=The War Poets|year=1945|publisher=John Day Company|location=New York|page=466|url=http://www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/pdf/reed/williamswarpoets.pdf}} After Dunkirk, he volunteered for training as a fighter pilot. His initial training in Torquay and Carlisle{{cite book|last=Fussell|first=Paul|title=Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War|year=1989|publisher=Oxford University Press|pages=[https://archive.org/details/wartimeunderstan00paul/page/79 79]–80|url=https://archive.org/details/wartimeunderstan00paul |url-access=registration}} 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.{{cite web|last=Ferrar|first=Marcus|title=Timothy Corsellis – a war poet's struggle with conscience|date=20 December 2011 |url=https://mferrar.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/timothy-corsellis-a-war-poets-struggle-with-conscience/|accessdate=26 August 2012}} 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.{{cite web|title=A.T.A. Casualties|publisher=The RAF Lichfield Association|url=http://www.raf-lichfield.co.uk/ATA%20Casualties.htm|accessdate=27 May 2013}} He was 20 years old.{{cite journal|last=Connell|first=Tim|title=Review of Mervyn Peake|journal=Times Literary Supplement|date=8 July 2011|url=http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showdoc=1183;doctype=review|accessdate=25 May 2013}}

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{{cite book|last=Rhys|first=Keidrych|title=The Van Pool and Other Poems|year=1942|publisher=Routledge|page=33|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OJwVAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1 }} and Patricia Ledward {{cite book|last=Colin Strang and|first=Patricia Ledward|title=Retrospect 1939–1942|year=1947|publisher=Falcon Press|pages=42–44}} wrote elegies for him, and included some of his poems in their anthologies, Poems from the Forces,{{cite book|last=Rhys|first=Keidrych|title=Poems from the Forces|year=1941|publisher=Routledge|pages=11–17|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9Hk1AQAAIAAJ&q=Timothy+Corsellis}}' More Poems from the Forces {{cite book|last=Rhys|first=Keidrych|title=More Poems from the Forces|year=1942|publisher=Routledge|pages=52–60|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X14VAAAAIAAJ&q=%22poems+from+the+forces%22}} and Poems of This War by Younger Poets.{{cite book|last=Colin Strang and|first=Patricia Ledward|title=Poems of this War by Younger Poets|year=1942|publisher=Cambridge University Press}} As John Sutherland{{cite book|last=Sutherland|first=John|title=Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography|year=2004|publisher=Viking|pages=560–561|isbn=9780195346381|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=z1EK8OW0UMEC&pg=PA561 }} 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".{{cite book|last=Spender|first=Stephen|title=New Collected Poems|year=2004|publisher=Faber and Faber|page=373|isbn=9780571222797|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HwNsQgAACAAJ&q=stephen+spender+new+collected+poems+corsellis}} The American anthologist Oscar Williams championed his work,{{cite book|last=Williams|first=Oscar|title=The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century|year=1945|publisher=John Day Company|location=New York|pages=3, 4, 8|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=AXPPAAAAMAAJ&q=oscar+williams+corsellis}} and an American poet and former war pilot, Simon Perchik, has paid him tribute.{{cite book|last=Perchik|first=Simon|title=Hands Collected|year=2008|publisher=Pavement Saw Press|location=Columbus|page=81|isbn=9781886350861|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gzxbAAAAMAAJ&q=where+are+you+timothy+corsellis}} 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,{{cite web|last=Blythe|first=Ronald|title=Timothy Corsellis|url=http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/60/101060660/|work=Oxford Dictionary of National Biography|accessdate=14 July 2012}} while critics as well known as Andrew Sinclair{{cite book|last=Sinclair|first=Andrew|title=The War Decade|year=1989|publisher=Hamish Hamilton|pages=48–9, 109–111, 227|isbn=9780241125670|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pSiaAAAAIAAJ&q=andrew+sinclair+war+decade+corsellis}} and D.S.R. Welland {{cite book|last=Welland|first=D.S.R.|title=The United States: A Companion to American Studies|year=1987|publisher=Taylor and Francis|page=314|isbn=9780416281507|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X5sOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA416 }} have singled out his work.

In 2012, Helen Goethals's The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis {{cite book|last=Goethals|first=Helen|title=The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis|year=2012|publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing|isbn=978-1-4438-3975-4|url=http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438-3975-4-sample.pdf|access-date=26 August 2012|archive-date=3 December 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131203014128/http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438-3975-4-sample.pdf|url-status=dead}} 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 {{cite journal|last=Halsall|first=Martyn|title=Poet of Blitz and Home Front|journal=Church Times|date=21 December 2012|url=http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2012/21-december/reviews/book-reviews/poet-of-blitz-and-home-front|accessdate=25 May 2013}} – "This study assists the debate on war poetry from 1939 to 1945" – and Ralph Townsend in The Trusty Servant{{cite journal|last=Townsend|first=Ralph|title=Book review|journal=The Trusty Servant|pages=19–21|date=November 2012|url=http://wincollsoc.org/document.doc?id=374|accessdate=25 May 2013|archive-date=3 December 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131203035921/http://wincollsoc.org/document.doc?id=374|url-status=dead}} – "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.".{{cite web|title=War Words: poetry inspired by the First and Second World Wars|publisher=PRONI, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland|url=http://www.proni.gov.uk/index/exhibitions_talks_and_events/talks_and_events/war_words.htm|accessdate=25 August 2014}}

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.{{cite web|title=The First Annual Timothy Corsellis Prize|publisher=Poetry Society|url=http://www.youngpoetsnetwork.org.uk/2014/07/11/the-first-annual-timothy-corsellis-prize/|accessdate=25 August 2014}}

File:Montagu Mansions, Marylebone - geograph.org.uk - 1879553.jpg

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.{{Cite episode |title=Episode 3 |series=A House Through Time |series-link=A House Through Time |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002389r/a-house-through-time-series-5-two-cities-at-war-episode-3 |accessdate=21 October 2024 |network=BBC Television |station= |date=2024 |series-no=5 |number= 3|transcript= |transcript-url= }}

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

{{Quote box

|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 box

|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 box

|source=from "It is not you, pale lonely star" (August 22, 1941)

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|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 box

|source=from "The gifts" (August 28, 1941)

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|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.

}}

• Keidrych Rhys (ed.), Poems from the Forces, Routledge, 1941
• – [https://books.google.com/books?id=X14VAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA55 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.),[https://books.google.com/books?id=AXPPAAAAMAAJ&q=Timothy+Corsellis 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.), [https://books.google.com/books?id=1QVaAAAAMAAJ 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.

{{Reflist|30em}}

• [https://books.google.com/books?id=sIIUuwAACAAJ Book on Timothy by Helen Goethals (The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry of Timothy Corsellis)]
• [http://www.warpoets.org/conflicts/ww2/corsellis/ Article on Timothy by Helen Goethals, on The War Poets Association website (From Winchester to War: Timothy Corsellis (1921–1941))] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20131117125450/http://www.warpoets.org/conflicts/ww2/corsellis/ |date=17 November 2013 }}
• [http://mferrar.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/timothy-corsellis-a-war-poets-struggle-with-conscience/ Article on Timothy by Marcus Ferrar (Timothy Corsellis – a war poet’s struggle with conscience)]
• [http://www.justincroft.com/blog/?p=50 Article on Timothy by Justin Croft (publication of an Antiques Roadshow discovery – war poet Timothy Corsellis)]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20150610202615/http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/in-paths-of-light-6169797.html Article on Stephen Spender, mentioning Timothy, by Paul Binding in the Independent (In paths of light)]
• [http://www.henrybentinck.com/ Website dedicated to a close friend of Timothy, Henry Noel Bentinck, 1919–1997]
• [http://www.poetryclass.poetrysociety.org.uk/download.cfm?id=62 Lesson plan to support the Timothy Corsellis Prize] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150106055537/http://www.poetryclass.poetrysociety.org.uk/download.cfm?id=62 |date=6 January 2015 }}

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Category:1921 births

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Category:20th-century English male writers

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Category:Aviators killed in aviation accidents or incidents in Scotland

Category:British civilians killed in World War II

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Category:Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1941

Category:World War II poets

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