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Palgrave Macmillan

W. S. Graham and Lyric Self-Consciousness

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  • © 2025

Overview

  • Considers the formal vitality of the lyric after modernism, with reference to new developments in lyric theory
  • Proposes a formally oriented notion of lyric self-consciousness
  • Presents unprecedented archival work from both public and private archives

Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (MPCC)

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About this book

This book examines the lyric poetry of the late modernist W. S. Graham. By listening closely to his body of work, it exposes the capacity of a poem to describe itself being made in the mind of a reader. The study locates an idea of lyric self-consciousness not only at the level of ego, but as a process of form. Archival material – including worksheets, manuscripts and notebooks – is used to examine Graham's spatial conception of verse in the context of his industrial background and his dialogue with artists. The book offers close readings of the adjacent poetics of William Empson and Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and concludes with a sustained analysis of Denise Riley's long-term engagement with Graham’s poetry, which suggests how Graham’s lyric experiments can be politicised.

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

Reviews

“As Sam Buchan-Watts says in this ambitious, affectionate, and astute monograph, what he has undertaken here is to “work with Graham, whose rich body of poetry exposes the apparatus underpinning self-consciousness in language”. Their collaboration has yielded profound insights into Graham’s particular form of self-consciousness, which as Buchan-Watts points out, offers one of the most fully articulated theories of lyric as the structure within which a poem might cancel its own noise to allow other voices to be audible. Buchan-Watts offers a compelling account of the way that Graham’s poetry seems “to read itself”, why it does so and to what ends we might put that self-reading. Rich in detail, sensitive to the intermedial dialogue of Graham’s poetics, and with the keen eye for form of a practicing poet, this book will offer readers a new, thoughtful way into the extremely self-consciously constructed space of Graham’s poetry.” (Hugh Foley, author of “Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire”)

“A probing, artful and original exploration of one of our most enigmatic twentieth-century writers. This pathfinding study makes significant contributions not only to our grasp of W. S. Graham, his art and poetry, and his enduring legacies, but to our understanding of artistic selfhood, modernist craft, and lyric in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Documenting contemplation, connection, and exchange across Graham's life and work, this is a genuinely interdisciplinary project; the book blends theoretical subtlety with archival detail to arrive at illuminating readings and critical revelations.  Buchan Watts’ approach - reading Graham’s poetry through conceptions of space, sound, image, form - poses important questions for the future of the study of modern and contemporary lyric poetry.” (Natalie Ferris, author of “Abstraction in Post-War British Literature 1945-1980”)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Newcastle University, London, UK

    Sam Buchan-Watts

About the author

Sam Buchan-Watts is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Fine Art at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of the poetry collection Path Through Wood (Prototype, 2021) and co-editor of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with W. S. Graham. 

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