Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Contacting Graham
- 2 ‘Listen’: W.S. Graham
- 3 Graham and the 1940s
- 4 ‘Roaring between the lines’: W.S. Graham and the White Threshold of Line-Breaks
- 5 Abstract, Real and Particular: Graham and Painting
- 6 Syntax Gram and the Magic Typewriter: W.S. Graham's Automatic Writing
- 7 Dependence in the Poetry of W.S. Graham
- 8 Achieve Further through Elegy
- 9 Graham and the Numinous: The ‘Centre Aloneness’ and the ‘Unhailed Water’
- 10 The Poetry of W.S. Graham
- Further Reading
- General Index
- Index of Graham's Works
10 - The Poetry of W.S. Graham
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Contacting Graham
- 2 ‘Listen’: W.S. Graham
- 3 Graham and the 1940s
- 4 ‘Roaring between the lines’: W.S. Graham and the White Threshold of Line-Breaks
- 5 Abstract, Real and Particular: Graham and Painting
- 6 Syntax Gram and the Magic Typewriter: W.S. Graham's Automatic Writing
- 7 Dependence in the Poetry of W.S. Graham
- 8 Achieve Further through Elegy
- 9 Graham and the Numinous: The ‘Centre Aloneness’ and the ‘Unhailed Water’
- 10 The Poetry of W.S. Graham
- Further Reading
- General Index
- Index of Graham's Works
Summary
Although he has not reprinted all his early poems – there are a fair number omitted from Cage Without Grievance and 2ND Poems, and The Seven Journeys is not represented at all – the uncompromising chronological arrangement of his ‘Collected’ presents Graham's readers with a dense initial verbal blast or barrage redolent of the whole heady iconolatry of the 1940s, and they must persist through these vatic voluntaries until they reach the clearer air of The White Threshold (1949), The Nightfishing (1955), and the later work of the 1970s. In the early poems, the word is king but meaning is not; and yet, as in the similar poetry of Dylan Thomas, there are frequent lines which stand out and refuse to be forgotten:
Gone to no end but each man's own
or
Through all the suburbs children trundle cries
or
O gentle queen of the afternoon
or
I walk as a lonely energy at large through my host
– the last of these in a poem unfortunately omitted from the Collected Poems. In an essay published in this early period, ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (Poetry Scotland, No. 3, July 1946), Graham wrote:
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 words in a certain order, good or bad by the significance of its addition to life […] Let us endure the sudden affection of the language.
He did not escape the obvious dangers lurking in that view, the overtaking of sense by sound, the over-estimation of subconscious and chance elements, the frustrating of argument and persuasion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- W. S. GrahamSpeaking Towards You, pp. 186 - 194Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004