Where The People Are Language And Community In The Poetry Of W. S. Graham

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.Francis, Matthew is the author of 'Where The People Are Language And Community In The Poetry Of W. S. Graham' with ISBN 9781844710485 and ISBN 1844710483.