I

Reviewing The Nightfishing in 1956, James Dickey wrote that W.S. Graham was ‘the most individual and important young poet now writing in English’. Graham was then 38 years old. His poetry, and his literary life, would seem to have been expressions of independence. In a review of The White Threshold from 1950, Edwin Morgan saw Graham as remaining ‘undistracted and unwooed’, while Calvin Bedient in 1974 assumed that ‘[his] cultivated eccentricity argues the right to stand alone’. But independence had its price. Others have seen Graham's poetry, at least up to The Nightfishing (1955), as only too dependent on the voice of Dylan Thomas. Kenneth Allott, on the basis of that volume, grudgingly accepted that ‘W.S. Graham is probably a poet, although one who cherishes some bad poetic habits and is excessively literary’. Edward Lucie-Smith was not much warmer, putting Graham's independence, which he implies is mere isolation, down to unfortunate coincidences of publishing. He makes Graham's reputation painfully dependent on the tides of literary fashion. So when Morgan wrote of Graham's ‘undeviating and dangerous single-mindedness’, was it challengingly ‘dangerous’ for the reader, or damagingly thus for the poet and his poetry's reception?

The solitude of independence can be bracing, but also chilly. Damian Grant describes Graham as ‘concerned with putting into words those sudden desolations and happiness that descend on us uninvited there where we each are within our lonely rooms never really entered by anybody else and from which we never emerge’. For Graham, life appears an imposed independence, from which release may be sought in poetry. His brief manifesto, published in 1946, is called ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’. In this aloneness and isolation of the self, Graham's poetry finds an irreducible condition, but the actions of his poems, recognizing and speaking from that solitude, shape communicating messages that are emblems of aloneness, potentially relieved. This project continually comes up against questions of dependence and independence – questions that Graham's chosen way of life also highlighted.