Where the People Are Language and Community in the Poetry of W. S. Graham
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Matthew Francis is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is a poet and novelist whose most recent collection is Dragons (Faber, 2001). His work has won the TLS / Blackwell’s Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize (twice) and the Welsh Book of the Year Award. He is the editor of W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems (Faber, 2004).William Sydney Graham (1918–1986) is increasingly acknowledged as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century. In playful but profound exercises in self-reflexivity, such as ‘Implements in their Places’ and ‘What is the Language Using Us for?’, he lays down a challenge to his readers which this book takes up. What exactly is he saying about language, and how are his concerns related to the apparently similar ones of postmodern theory? Matthew Francis offers a surprising answer: the theme of language in the poems is inextricable from that of community. Writing, for Graham, must always justify itself in terms of an idealized model of community based on his working-class Clydeside childhood. His work is haunted by guilt: in becoming a writer he felt he had betrayed his family and background. He attempts to assuage this by means of an ingenious metaphor that presents language itself as a community.
Francis traces the development of this metaphor from the experimentalism of the early poems through the complexities of Graham’s most ambitious poem, ‘The Nightfishing’, to the subtlety and daring of the late work. Finally, he looks at some intriguing unpublished writings, and shows that their resistance to closure and dalliance with automatism are further attempts to solve this problem. Here as elsewhere, Graham’s brilliant rhetoric and deep insight into language are products of a quest for a mythical linguistic community, ‘where the people are’.
William Sydney Graham (1918–1986) is increasingly widely acknowledged as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century. This study relates his poetic exploration of language to his nostalgic memories of his Clydeside childhood, and argues that his work tries to turn language itself into a community.
- Introduction
- List of Abbreviations
- Chapter 1
- Poet of Language
- Chapter 2
- Poet of Community
- Chapter 3
- Electrifying the Cage: The Early Poems
- Chapter 4
- Drowning in Words: The Middle Period
- Chapter 5
- Voices in the Snow: The Late Poems
- Chapter 6
- Dreams and Clusters: Some Unpublished Writings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
At the beginning and end of his career, Graham was a poet of some reputation. In the 1940s, he lectured at New York University, received an Atlantic Award and took part in a reading tour in the US with Kathleen Raine and David Gascoyne. His editor T.S. Eliot praised his work, with the flattering proviso that it ‘was “intellectual” poetry and would go slow because people were lazy about thinking’. The last two collections and the Collected Poems were widely noticed: Malcolm Mooney’s Land and Implements were Poetry Book Society Choices and the prepublicity for the Collected Poems included an Observer Magazine interview with Penelope Mortimer. In 1974, he was awarded a Civil List Pension, thanks to the efforts of Robin Skelton. Nevertheless, Eliot appears to have been right – Graham’s work has still not received the attention its power and originality deserves. Since his death, though, a revival of interest has been slowly gathering momentum, culminating in the annotated New Collected Poems, which I have recently edited for Faber.
My own first experience of Graham was through the poem ‘Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons’, which I came across in an anthology when I was an undergraduate, and found exceptionally vivid and powerful. Who was this poet, and why had I never heard of him before? Undergraduates often assume they have heard of everyone important, but my reaction turns out to be fairly typical, and ‘Quantz’ probably remains Graham’s most popular poem. Like many anthology pieces, it is in some ways uncharacteristic of its author: a Browningesque dramatic monologue full of historical and regional colour, quite unlike the more obviously allegorical ‘Malcolm Mooney’s Land’, it is about music rather than language, and deals with a type of relationship which Graham had little experience of in his own life (at least in a formal sense), that between a teacher and a student. Rereading the present study, I notice I have mentioned it only once, in passing. It is a fine poem, but it will always stand a little apart from the main body of work; one might even argue that, in its concern with the social dimension of art (or Art), it transcends its author’s usual obsessions – though loneliness and silence are still there, hauntingly evoked. Years later, I found the Collected Poems in a bookshop and, opening it at random, read ‘Imagine a Forest’, which confirmed my impression that I had ‘discovered’ a major poet. By the time I enrolled for a PhD at Southampton University, there was only one possible subject for my thesis. My starting-point was an attempt to understand some of the statements about language in the late poems and, in particular, how they related to apparently similar statements I was encountering at the time in literary theory. The work I began then forms the basis of this book.