W. S. Graham and Lyric Self-Consciousness and Path Through Wood

The critical component of this thesis considers the formal vitality of lyric in the face of modernist anxieties about communication in language in the work of the British poet W. S. Graham (1918-88.) This is achieved, I argue, through his rendering of lyric subjectivity and self-description from relatively early in his career as an inherently spatial problem (chapter 1). Graham constructs levels of self-consciousness of form as distinct from a more general lyric self-consciousness. This approach is generatively abstracted by the influence of Graham’s relationship to the St Ives visual artists, particularly Ben Nicholson (chapter 2). By concentrating on key 1950s works, notebooks and archival material, I evidence a phase in which Graham inhabited and expanded received forms – the villanelle, the ballad, the sonnet – in order to foster a more intuitive formalism, one that aligns in many ways with the poetics of his near contemporaries William Empson and Veronica Forrest-Thomson (chapters 3 and 4), but differs in its embrace of a linguistic unconscious. The final chapter (chapter 5) considers Denise Riley’s career-long engagement with Graham’s work, which ‘answers’ Graham, attuned as it is to poetry as listening, and at the same time charges some of Graham’s propositions with a new political urgency. The thesis concludes that the most appropriate means of listening critically to Graham’s project and Riley’s extension of it is to parallel the critical component in practical terms: to attempt to ‘answer’ some of the problems posed by these poets and this thesis in creative practice. This gives rise to the creative component, Path Through Wood.