W.S. Graham's unpublished writing is, arguably, an attempt to escape from the fixity and impersonality he associates with printed text, to bathe in the sea of language without freezing to death in the Arctic of the completed poem. That is one of the reasons why there is so much of it. The late unpublished writing constitutes almost an alternative oeuvre to the poems of Malcolm Mooney's Land and Implements in their Places, one whose creative energy and radical technique represents a remarkable avant-garde challenge to the institution of literature.

The late Robin Skelton's archive of Graham manuscripts, now in the Library of the University of Victoria, Canada, contains one item of exceptional interest. It is a copy of the book Toward the Well-Being of Mankind by Robert Shaplen, which Graham has defaced with graffiti-like annotations and by pasting in prose manuscripts of his own (I use the word ‘manuscripts’ to include typescripts, which the vast majority of them are). It is these pasted-in pieces that I want to consider in this essay. The dates that Graham habitually wrote on the manuscripts, often incorporating them into the text or using them as part of a heading as one does with a letter, reveal that they were written between 1967 and 1973. Shaplen's book was used as a convenient medium for transmitting the manuscripts to Skelton, who was paying Graham a small regular income in exchange for them. Graham also sent some of the material in the form of letters to his friend Ruth Hilton.

These prose manuscripts are, for the most part, experiments with automatic writing, and represent an exceptionally frenzied spell of creative activity. Many phrases and images that eventually appeared in his last two collections were generated in this way. Whatever its degree of intrinsic literary interest, automatic writing was a significant factor in the production of the late poetry.