'Where people are' : language and community in the poetry of W.S. Graham

Francis, Matthew Charles (1998) 'Where people are' : language and community in the poetry of W.S. Graham. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

W.S. Graham (1918-1986) is increasingly widely acknowledged as an important poet. Nevertheless, the critical debate about his work has so far been limited both in quantity and in scope; the one major study, like other considerations of Graham, is largely concerned with establishing his status. It is time to put aside the issue of evaluation and to concentrate instead on the thematic questions raised by the poems themselves.

This study identifies two principal themes in Graham's writing: language and community. The poems explore their own textuality and put forward a view of language as reified and autonomous. This matters because for Graham writing must always justify itself in terms of a model of community based on his Clydeside childhood, and his belief in textual autonomy makes any such justification deeply problematic. His ideals of text as a sphere of total control and community as one of total love are not only opposed, but also mythical; neither goal is attainable, but Graham seeks both. He thus hopes to assuage his guilt at rejecting his home and family for a literary career without giving up the sense of control which attracted him to poetry in the first place. He tries to achieve this by means of a complex and unstable metaphor which treats language as an alternative form of community, simultaneously transcendent and inadequate, exceeding it in authority but lacking its human comforts.

In Chapters 1 and 2 I outline and critique Graham's models of language and community respectively. Chapters 3 to 5 examine the published poems from the three phases of his career: the early work is a celebration of textual autonomy, the poems of the middle period attempt to capture in words the flux of the lifeworld, while the late poems seek to demonstrate the impossibility of communication. Finally in Chapter 6 I analyse some unpublished writings and show that their resistance to closure and dalliance with automatism are further attempts to resolve this dilemma. Here as elsewhere his brilliant rhetoric and often deep insight into aspects of language are products of a quest for a mythical linguistic community, 'where the people are'

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics