On the peripheries of UK poetry culture during his lifetime, W. S. Graham is now recognized one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In the first concerted study of Graham's poetics in a generation, David Nowell Smith argues that Graham is exemplary for the poetics of the mid-century: his extension of modernist explorations of rhythm and diction; his interweaving of linguistic and geographic places; his dialogue with the plastic arts; and the tensions that run through his work, between philosophical seriousness and play, solitude and sociality, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, the heft and evanescence of poetry's medium. Drawing on newly unearthed archival materials, Nowell Smith orients Graham's poetics around the question of the 'art object'. Graham sought to craft his poems into honed, finished 'objects'; yet he was also aware that the poem's 'finished object' is never wholly finished. Graham's work thus facilitates a broader reflection on language as a medium for art-making.
About the AuthorDavid Nowell Smith is Associate Professor of Poetry/Poetics at the University of East Anglia. He is author of Sounding/Silence (Fordham University Press, 2013) and On Voice in Poetry (Palgrave, 2015), as well as numerous articles on the fundamental concepts of poetics.
Book InformationISBN 9780192842909
Author David Nowell SmithFormat Hardback
Page Count 298
Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 544g
Dimensions(mm) 224mm * 145mm * 20mm