W. S. Graham

• Name — William Sydney Graham • Born — 19 November 1918 • Birthplace — Greenock, Scotland • Died — 9 January 1986 • Place of death — Madron, Cornwall, England • Occupation — Poet • Language — English • Education — Stow College, Glasgow Newbattle Abbey College • Spouse — Agnes Kilpatrick Dunsmuir (Nessie Dunsmuir) • Children — Rosalind Mudaliar • Movement — Neo-romanticism • Notable Works — Cage Without Grievance The White Threshold The Nightfishing Malcolm Mooney's Land • Awards — Atlantic Award for Literature (1947) Civil List pension (1974)

Graham was born in Greenock. In 1932, he left school to become an apprentice draughtsman and then studied structural engineering at Stow College, Glasgow. He was awarded a bursary to study literature for a year at Newbattle Abbey College in 1938. Graham spent the war years working at a number of jobs in Scotland and Ireland before moving to Cornwall in 1944. His first book, Cage Without Grievance was published in 1942.

The 1940s were prolific years for Graham, and he published four more books during that decade. These were The Seven Journeys (1944), 2ND Poems (1945), The Voyages of Alfred Wallis (1948) and The White Threshold (1949). The style of these early poems led critics to see Graham as part of the neo-romantic group that included Dylan Thomas and George Barker. The affinities between these three poets derive from a common interest in poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane, and, in the case of Thomas and Graham, a taste for the Bohemian lifestyle of the London literary scene. In 1947, Graham received the Atlantic Award for Literature, and lectured at New York University whilst spending a year on a reading touring of the United States. He moved to London to be nearer the hub of its Bohemian world. Here he came into contact with T. S. Eliot, then editor of Faber and Faber, who published The White Threshold, which includes varied recollections of his childhood and youth in Scotland. Faber and Faber remained Graham's publishers for the rest of his life.

• Illustration — The Grahams' home in Madron He married another poet, Agnes Kilpatrick Dunsmuir (1909–1999), known as Nessie Dunsmuir. Graham died on 9 January 1986, aged 67. In 2006, 20 years after his death, memorial plaques were unveiled in Fore Street, Madron where he spent his final years, and at his birthplace, 1 Hope Street, Greenock. In an event to mark his centenary year, a memorial stone to Graham was unveiled in the Makars' Court, Edinburgh on 14 June 2018, and Graham's daughter Rosalind Mudaliar donated his writing chair to the Scottish Poetry Library. Copyright in Graham's works is held by his daughter, Rosalind Mudaliar.

• Greig, Andrew (1980), review of Collected Poems 1942 - 1977, in Lindsay, Maurice (ed.), The Scottish Review: Arts and Environment 19, August 1980, pp. 58 & 59,

• Cage without Grievance, Parton Press, 1942 • The Seven Journeys, William MacLellan, 1944 • 2ND Poems, Nicholson and Watson, 1945 • The White Threshold, Faber and Faber, 1949 • The Nightfishing, Faber and Faber, 1955 • Malcolm Mooney’s Land, Faber and Faber, 1970 • Approaches to How They Behave, Donut Press, 2009 (extracted from Malcolm Mooney's Land) • Implements in their Places, Faber and Faber, 1977 • Uncollected Poems, Greville Press, 1990 • Aimed at Nobody: Poems from Notebooks, ed. Margaret Blackwood and Robin Skelton, Faber and Faber, 1993

• Penguin Modern Poets 17, David Gascoyne, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Penguin Books, 1970 • The Night Fisherman: Selected Letters of W. S. Graham, ed. Michael and Margaret Snow, Carcanet, 1999 • The Caught Habits of Language: An Entertainment for W. S. Graham for Him Having Reached One Hundred, ed. Rachael Boast, Andy Ching, Nathan Hamilton, Donut Press, 2018