Graham, W(illiam) S(ydney)

Graham, W(illiam) S(ydney) (1918-1986), Scottish poet. Graham was born at Greenock, on the River Clyde, in Scotland. He left school at 14, and later studied part-time at the University of Glasgow. At the beginning of World War II he avoided conscription by moving to the Irish Republic, but later returned to Britain to work in a torpedo factory. In 1954 he moved to Cornwall, where he remained, always poor. A Romantic, but influenced by European and North American poetry, his Cage Without a Grievance (1942), and other books during the 1940s, were praised by T. S. Eliot. The Nightfishing (1955) is his best-known volume. His Collected Poems 1942-1977 were published in 1979 and a posthumous collection, Aimed at Nobody, in 1993.