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This chapter explores how Graham’s ballads serve as both discrete technical experiments and performative engagements with literary tradition, linked to his ambivalent relationship to his Scottish identity. The chapter takes up the uncollected ‘The Song of the Tower’, given to the artist Sven Berlin in 1949, as reflective of a period in which Graham experimented with received, communally oriented verse forms. This resulted in two ballads, ‘The Broad Close’ and ‘Baldy Bane’, that Graham thought highly ‘technically sophisticated’, and which reflect what he called ‘nostalgia of a form’. The chapter concludes by considering formal nostalgia in the context of transhistorical claims for lyric.

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‘Nostalgia of a Form’: Graham’s Self-Conscious Balladry

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Sam Buchan-Watts

摘要

This chapter explores how Graham’s ballads serve as both discrete technical experiments and performative engagements with literary tradition, linked to his ambivalent relationship to his Scottish identity. The chapter takes up the uncollected ‘The Song of the Tower’, given to the artist Sven Berlin in 1949, as reflective of a period in which Graham experimented with received, communally oriented verse forms. This resulted in two ballads, ‘The Broad Close’ and ‘Baldy Bane’, that Graham thought highly ‘technically sophisticated’, and which reflect what he called ‘nostalgia of a form’. The chapter concludes by considering formal nostalgia in the context of transhistorical claims for lyric.