W.S. Graham remains an anomaly. Praised during his lifetime by T.S. Eliot and published by Faber and Faber (Graham – jokingly – called them ‘Fibber & Fibber’), he is nonetheless most admired and respected by those poets and critics who disdain mainstream poetry publishing and who style themselves as renegades. In Iain Sinclair's anthology of so-called ‘elective outsiders’, Conductors of Chaos (1996), for example, Graham is one among the five poets of ‘previous generations’ nominated as significant father figures. The others are David Gascoyne, Nicholas Moore, J.F. Hendry and David Jones.

To a certain extent, therefore, Graham straddles the great divide in contemporary poetry, between the mass-marketed super-league on the one hand and the worthy unknowns and solipsistic self-publishers on the other. He remains in poetry's shadow cabinet. There are perhaps several reasons for this. He was not, apparently, an easy man to get on with, which might have been a boon but turned out to be a bane to his reputation. According to Julian MacLaren-Ross, in his Memoirs of the Forties, Graham was the sort of man who, if ‘you greeted him by saying “Good Afternoon”, he would morosely reply, “What's good about it?”’. This seems not to have gone down especially well in Fitzrovia in the 1940s.

Tony Lopez maintains that this unfavourable account reflects more on MacLaren-Ross than on Graham (see ER75, p. 10). Graham's friend David Wright evokes MacLaren-Ross in the Wheatsheaf in Soho, ‘teddy-bear coated and malacca-caned, [holding] court at the corner of its saloon bar’ (ER75, p. 49). The mixture of foppishness and dominance would have goaded Graham for class reasons. Waiting until 1992, six years after Graham's death, Donald Davie described him as ‘a Clydeside proletarian, half-educated and bloody-minded’. Perhaps. But encountering snobbishness like this, spoken or hidden, would try anyone's patience.