W.S. Graham, Martin Heidegger and the Concept of Language

W.S. Graham's focus on language in his poetry sheds light on one significant aspect of language. It was Calvin Bedient who drew attention to this in his essay ‘Absentist Poetry: Kinsella, Hill, Graham, and Hughes’. The Absentist¹ movement of poetry has vast dimensions but in this paper I would like to concentrate on ‘Absentist Language’. Absentist language deals with the inadequacies of language, its lacunae of words and expressions of modern life. One of the elements of Absentist language in Graham's poetry is “inauthentic language”. Inauthentic language is a Heideggerian term of language that is in contrast with ‘authentic language’. In his Time and Being (1962) and Existence and Being (1968), he introduced terms of authentic being in contrast to inauthentic being. Later in his Poetry, Language, Thought (1971) and his essay “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, Heidegger explains the same terms with regard to language. In this paper I would like to show how Heidegger as a philosopher and Graham as a poet, in two different fields, but similar, show the importance of language in regard to being.

Graham in his poem in title “Five Verses Beginning with the Word Language” from the collection of poems Implement in Their Places (1977), shows how man is in the cage of language. This study enables us to understand one of the greatest problems of modern man in 20^th century. The calamity of modern man in the form of the crises of identity according to Absentist language has roots in our language. W.S. Graham the famous poet of Scotland during 1950s-1970s and Martin Heidegger, the German Philosopher (1988–1976) both have similar and unique ideas about language.