The responsibility of a poet to as well as for his poem implies a radical shift in emphasis from the kind of responsibility elected so often in recent times by the poets themselves. The poets of the thirties saw their responsibility as being towards History (always capitalized), society, current events, Marx or Freud. The supposed romantic revolution of the forties placed the poet's responsibility at his own doorstep. The poet was to be responsible to the individual and thus, microcosmically, to encompass a greater responsibility towards society, which, in its organized forms, was abjured. All these forms of responsibility are, in a quite literal sense, outside, even physically outside the poem. When in W. S. Graham's Notes on a Poetry of Release, one finds a poet still in his twenties defining his responsibilities strictly in terms of his obligation to make words work in a certain way, one recognizes how ancillary to the true craftsman's affection for his materials are other attitudes. Graham, whatever other habit he shares with the younger generation of romantics, or however much he continues what is already likely to be thought of as the 'tradition' of Dylan Thomas, is entirely single in his primary dedication—to the poem:

… A poem is made of words. It is words in a certain order, good or bad, by the significance of its addition to life, and not to be judged by any other value put upon it by imagining how or why or by what kind of man it was made. It is easy to strive to make a poem out of the wrong material like a table out of water. It is easy to mistake a poem for a different thing with a different function and to be sad when it does not put out what it is not…. The meaning of a word in a poem is never more than its position. The meaning of a poem is itself not less a comma. But then to each man it comes into new life. It is brought to life by the reader and takes part in the reader's change.'

Such an intention leads us to expect a concern with technique in Graham's poetry. But to think that his complex, consciously constructed poems are merely technical in their end, is to falsify what a concern with words means. A poem by definition should rule out such a possibility. To see that the poet is concerned with words in a certain order, and that this order has a meaning at least for the duration of the poem, is to allow the poet his richest possible function and the poem its best intensity of meaning.

In the light of Kenneth Burke's suggestive metaphor on the indivisibility of means and ends in poetry—'the container and the thing contained'—how does Graham use words to explore the imagination?… The Seven Journeys provides useful signposts to his direction. The seven journeys are, in fact, seven longish narrative poems each clustering around a nexus of experience such as sex, intellect, the marvellous, love, etc. The fiction of an 'I'-narrator (announced in a prologue poem, 'The Narrator') serves as a hub or spindle upon which to centre the various data of these explorations or journeys. Though the poems as formal units suffer from a lack of sustained intellectual direction, individual lines and passages almost compensate for this. In all of the journeys a reliance is placed quite characteristically … on the poet's inward resources for seeing a 'reality' and for creation…. (pp. 216-17)

It is the exact vision of a dynamic of order or of chaos within even the narrowest physical confines of animal, place, or thing which the poet-narrator, in a final wish, hopes

                Is yet enchanted into form.

The reader's participation in the making of a poem is invited, but, at the same time, primacy is given to the supreme fiction of the poet's autonomy as maker…. (p. 217)

It is, in a sense, quite crucial to the whole body of Graham's work that he has a rich stock of imagery of small, usually organic things … which serve to reduce to a minute scale the dimensions of the outside, geographic universe, so that we see the whole complicated life of the microcosm as a sign of the larger whole in which it manages to sustain its own inner wholeness. This curious way of sorting 'History in a bowl' may, physiologically traced, derive from Graham's early training as a precision engineer and the concern for small exactitudes and the readings of the micrometer involved in it. This recurrent closing down of the field of vision, as it were, may be a symbol of the narrowing of the margins of the self, and the assertion of the superior integrity of the individual universe in an environment which threatens to engulf, or, at least, invade it. Other instances in The Seven Journeys of this closing in of the focus of observation are found in similes such as:

         Like down a polar spiral in a berg of bone,

or in the fine melancholy of a passage like:

   Somewhere in distilled harmonies a tumult spins,
   One for each human constellation in a skull,
   And blows a world of faculties in a watched bubble
   And ribs my magpie comet in a cage without grievance.

These lines, incidentally, are instructive to examine for the way in which the imagery breeds the philosophical generalization of the aloneness of 'each human constellation' rather than, as so often happens in 'philosophical' poetry, the generalization fumbling about for appropriate imagery.

When we arrive at a consideration of Graham's next volume, Cage Without Grievance, we find a consolidation of linguistic practice which makes for greater ease and simplicity in the movement of the rhetoric. This, of course, should not suggest that the poetry is more simple. The formal influences at work here continue to be Dylan Thomas in the syntax and in the rich sexual imagery of 'To girls at the turn of night love goes on knocking', with the newer presences of Rimbaud in poems like 'There was when Morning Fell', and in the fine lyric, 'O Gentle Queen of the Afternoon', and of Blake in a deliberately archaic pantheism which is suggested in the projection of a sexual dualism into all the aspects of the physical universe. Hopkins is obviously operative in such packed lines as:

     Cruel to myself my nicknamed heart, named Rock
     Dams here now next and every time Time's burn

or in the alliterative pressure of:

          No fonder father have you in tear and fire,

as well as in compound anglo-saxon words like 'wound-well', self-nailed, etc. The poem in which this charged rhetoric occurs, 'Endure no Conflict. Crosses are Keepsakes', like Hopkins' poems, is about morality, but it is not a congenial to Hopkins' Catholicism. The tone in which this morality is enunciated is that of a hard, Northern didacticism. (There is a consistent use of Scots words and Scots place-names.) But Graham's morality is a morality of the 'anti-moral' in the sense that the poet is questioning a morality of self-sacrifice, of human saviourdom. 'Endure no Conflict. Crosses are Keepsakes', is the text. While this poem is not entirely successful, it is important in that it attempts to pose the antinomies of the conflict.

A poem which does succeed in defining the outlines of this paradox, and which is, perhaps, the most memorable poem of Cage Without Grievance, is 'I no more Real than Evil in my Roof'. Using the convention of the poet as spectator looking out from his house at children playing, the poem attempts to arrive at what is proper to the self as morality, without a sacrifice of the self's integrity. The diction is simple, uncluttered, and achieves a serene dignity through a careful usage of the homely physical objects and dimensions of a room: 'chair', 'table', 'window', 'lintel', 'floor', etc. The room and its physical objects must be taken to mean the enclosure or lineaments of the self, which, in the Blakeian sense, define it. The world outside the self (the children playing outside 'the window's needle eye') is viewed with tenderness but is kept, quite properly, outside. (pp. 217-19)

Graham's special tone in Cage Without Grievance is that of a profoundly serious search for a morality, but one which is sought for in poetic and not in philosophic terms. The notion that a lyric poet, which Graham first of all is, does not deal with 'ideas' must not be tolerated; the lyric can be an exploration of values and ideas, but it evokes them by means of a texture quite different from that of a 'philosophic' poem. (p. 219)

2nd Poems published in 1945, reveals a gradual sloughing off of the useful influences of Hopkins and Dylan Thomas along with a quickened interest in the linguistic pioneer work of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. (p. 220)

Philosophically … the poems of this collection suggest a considerable intellectual maturation. It is instructive to compare, for example, 'Next My Spade's Going', a poem concerned with Graham's early preoccupation with the mystery of relative dimensions and not merely physical ones …, with some of the earlier poems on this theme. Again, in the finely unsentimental but optimistic poem significantly titled 'A Letter More Likely to Myself', Graham considers the question of 'reality' and what is the 'world'. He a firms, after the deep humility of the opening lines, the joyful although not exclusive reality of whatever inner universe is constructed by the individual….

The essentially joyous temper of Graham's moral sensibility comes through with greatest clarity and beauty in the best of 2nd Poems, 'Many Without Elegy', a lament for 'the washed-away dead' which, in the end, turns into an indignant rejection of death-in-life…. (p. 221)

In considering Graham's recent verse published in various periodicals, I can think of no twentieth century poet who has utilized the resources of the sea as richly as he. It is important to stress that Graham is not a 'sea poet', and that the sea imagery is never used at merely an allusive literary level. The imagery is successful precisely because its vast range of ambiguities of connotation are grounded in realistic observation. Graham's youth on the west coast of Scotland and his recent years on the Cornish coast have yielded him a large fund of information about the sea, its own life and its man-made life. In a poem like 'Men Sign the Sea' all the aspects of this experience are fused by Graham's increasing technical skill into a tremendous cry of pity, terror and acceptance. (p. 222)

The impressive series 'Three Poems of Drowning' grows out of the same nexus of experience as 'Men Sign the Sea' and 'Night's Fall Unlocks the Dirge of the Sea'. The three poems of drowning are like the other sea poems in their exact realistic observation. In II we get 'The seafared pulses roar' and 'His settling hair swims longer round his eyes', and in III, 'Screaming bundles of foam', and powerfully descriptive adjectives of the water's action, 'sea-gentled' and 'sea's raging bridges'. All three poems heighten suspense through the syntactic device of piling up adverbs, or adjectives and participles used adverbially as in 'done down to nothing but locked into under', or 'his all grief well over'. (p. 223)

Of these poems, III is the most interesting philosophically. It reaffirms in different terms Graham's insistence on the human wrongness of lament for what is inexorably gone like 'the smiling lifestories' of the drowned. The poem's centre is the comparison of physical death by drowning with spiritual salvation as a kind of drowning of the past self. (pp. 223-24)

Perhaps the most adventurous and at the same time most thoroughly successful of Graham's recently published poems is 'For the Inmost Lost', which continues the examination of the paradox of the self as saviour. (p. 224)

While this poem is religious in its attitude towards a moral problem, and while this religious tone is partially created by the use of religious imagery such as the allusion to St. Catherine martyred on the burning wheel, the crossed rowan as a sign against evil, or the reference to Joseph in Egypt in 'the whole delta's bread / Brought bound into treasury,' etc., this imagery is not used for any traditional religious scheme. Words and phrases like 'evangel', 'angel', 'Adam's healer', 'christendom', 'honeyed', 'crucifixion', 'Pastures green', all of which have Biblical connotations, are used here to reinforce a private religion of self-knowledge. In the search for the best or 'lost'(?) self one is drawn into this intricate labyrinth of selves for which there is not an outside saviour, herb or ointment, but only its 'own heaven's briars' of difficulty and danger. This exploration of the self is a holy crusade in which the mind, like a storehouse of wheat, provides the sustenance of words to judge it. Accepting then the essential loneliness of such a search 'as I thread my thieves' (as the searching principle wends its way through its enemies or poisons) the possibility of vision discovered is suggested in the finality of the rhetorical last line:

    I walk as a lonely energy at large through my host.

The curious journalistic phrase 'at large', used so often for a lunatic at large or an animal at large, supports the melancholy of 'lonely' and the anonymity of a force like 'energy'. Anything 'at large' evokes a great sense of loss, loneliness, and sympathy for the thing of being so unanchored. The poem as a whole is the best exposition up to this time of the concern for a fresh morality which manifested itself, as I have indicated, from the very first in Graham's work. It expresses Graham's vision of 'self' as a self packed with all the world's possibilities for differences in individuals, the self as a unique collection of selves, but also a collection of uniques. (pp. 224-25)

Vivienne Koch, "W. S. Graham: The Technique of Morality," in Poetry Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter, 1947–48, pp. 216-25.