W. S. Graham

Having been rejected for national service on medical grounds, he had various jobs during the war and moved to Cornwall in 1943, where he was able to live rent-free in a caravan. Inspired by Graham’s poetry, the young Glasgow poet James Burns Singer pitched his tent in a neighbouring field, and for a while, took up the role as a notably critical acolyte to the elder poet. Graham received an Atlantic Award in 1947 and spent the year 1947-48 lecturing at New York University. Moving to London in 1948, he met T.S. Eliot who took his fourth book of poems, The White Threshhold, for Faber and Faber and they remained his publisher thereafter.

In 1954 he married Nessie Dunsmuir (1909-1999), a poet herself, whom he had met at Newbattle. They lived in near-poverty until a Civil List pension in 1974 alleviated things somewhat. After marriage he returned to Cornwall, residing in the village of Madron for the rest of his life, dying there on 9 January 1986. In 2006 commemorative plaques were established at both Fore Street, Madron, and at 1 Hope Street, Greenock, where he was born.

His long absence from Scotland meant that Graham was often overlooked in accounts of Scottish writing, although he corresponded with Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan, among others, and remained friendly towards Hugh MacDiarmid while their positions as regards to poetic language were very different. He wrote to William Montgomerie in 1969:

‘I certainly couldn’t write the poems I do without being Scots. Of course I have great bouts of homesickness for Scotland, the land and the people. But the selfconsciousness of what the Scottish art scene seems to be today embarrasses me tae hell.’

Graham’s early work could be described as neo-romantic and influenced by the New Apocalypse movement that rose around Dylan Thomas’ sudden rise to fame.  He experimented with the long poem format, published as The Nightfishing in 1955 (though written over many years), which, despite some powerful writing and imagery- the sea and fishing as symbolic of the creative process (‘What a restless space/ To trace stillness on’), was not a critical or popular success, and it would be fifteen years before he  published another collection.

In Cornwall he became friendly with the Scottish painters, Robert Colquhoun and Robert McBryde as well as a local group that included Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter. Their abstract work began to influence his poems – as an engineer he had always been interested in structure and the use of space. This, together with his linguistic obsession and the problem of communication, gives his work its particular character. He described it as speaking from one aloneness to another. His later poems make this connection with perhaps a greater clarity, certainly with a  greater warmth and a kind of unsentimental nostalgia, especially the poems about his father and Greenock, elegies for friends, and the love poems to his wife. ‘To Alexander Graham’ is one of the most moving poems he wrote.

Roderick Watson has described his ‘spare and elliptical beauty of voice’, and in his poem ‘W.S. Graham’ (Stolen Light: selected poems) Stewart Conn pays homage to

‘phrases
so perfectly turned and weightless
they’d defy gravity
but for the ice
that pins them in place’

Watson further comments, in The Literature of Scotland: the twentieth century (2007) ‘his poetry is driven first and foremost by a deeply personal need to communicate at a level of linguistic honesty, integrity and urgency.’ It is this emphasis on the word that makes Graham, in that terrible phrase, ‘a poet’s poet’.

The most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer. A poem is made of words. … It is brought to life by the reader and takes part in the reader’s change. (‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’)

He keeps asking, ‘What is the language using us for?’, and of any poem, ‘Does it disturb the language?’ Graham lived and wrote the life, and for that at least, for so many writers – and readers – he remains exemplary.

Graham’s desk, ‘The Untidy, Dreadful Table’, replete with various stains and cigarette burns, is in everyday use within the library, while the chair he is sat on in the photograph above is held in our archive.