W. S. Graham

W. S. Graham (1918-1986), Scottish poet. William Sydney 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 W. S. Graham 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. W. S. Graham’s Collected Poems 1942-1977 were published in 1979 and a posthumous collection, Aimed at Nobody, in 1993.