W.S. Graham is a writer intensely vigilant of, and generous to, the requirements and responsibilities of his reader, whomever they prove to be. But he is equally interested in directing the reader's imagination, of carefully (and sometimes aggressively) managing their response, of curating the spaces into which he places us. This thesis, then, approaches the dilemmas of these critical negotiations of control and contingency, wondering how we might attend to a presence that appears only to vanish, how Graham offers critics red-herrings and false-starts, how we might arrest and organise the ephemera of his verse-or how we let them go. It begins not with Graham but with Emily Dickinson: she is taken as an extreme example of how critics - knowingly or not - can tend to 'make up' texts and poets, or else feel a need to fill in the blanks that riddle such writings. The prologue therefore sees Dickinson and Graham - and the attendant problems of reading and editing them - as unexpectedly similar. Their poetries are shown to share concerns of (apparent) reclusiveness, isolation, and various kinds of blanknesses. Chapter 1 opens by thinking about letters as a specific mode of communication that shade complexly between biography and ambiguity. This is, in part, to read personality into letters that, in Graham's case, tack between genres. Here the thesis establishes a centre of readerly phenomenology via the ways in which criticism tries to establish a particular kind of poet to make things more manageable. It develops some of the prologue's ideas on the genitive demands we all make upon the poets we read, wishing them to be ours. There is, then, a certain amount of scene-setting used to demonstrate how this might happen, placing Graham in different contexts to show how readings might be controlled: Graham in his physical environment, Graham with his wife, Nessie, and Graham in his coterie. These are seen as essential illocutionary acts, acts of serious imaginative complexity, and acts that often go without saying. Chapter 2 moves to think about how Graham might say something back those who try and control him. He does this, in one way, by carefully stage-managing and curating his page-space. It then goes on to think about how Graham's poetics might be one composed significantly of blanks, gaps, and aporia. This poses problems surrounding theories and readings of intention in Graham's verse, which are shown often to result in instances of reading into and/or over-reading¬. Because Graham's verse is puzzled with instances of pronominal dissimulation, dissolution, and vanishing acts, it becomes hard to gauge his exact (and exacting) presence. The final part of the chapter discusses the trouble this causes for editing texts that tread such fine lines between control and release. Chapter 3 centres on a discussion between the autographic and allographic possibilities of Graham's verse (and print culture more generally). The initial section deals with the way Graham's texts often dwell in/on the peripheral and the elsewhere. This is a way of writing that comes with difficulties in establishing exactly where a text is located-something in which Graham had a presiding interest. The chapter then turns to various kinds of textual contingency found in and around Graham's poetry, considering the kinds that the poet himself establishes, and the kinds necessitated by editing practices. The final chapter uses the curious aesthetic and imaginative overlaps between Graham and Marcel Duchamp to reconsider Graham's relationship to both the parallel art-historical conversations in which he took part and the construction of his (probably) most well-known poem, THE NIGHTFISHING. It argues that the notion of the readymade emerges as vital to Graham's sense of poetic composition, control, and chance. Therefore it re-reads THE NIGHTFISHING and THE DARK DIALOGUES as a collection of found voices via Graham's interest in tape-recorders and radio, and discusses how Graham constructs his poems as, in his words, 'samples of air'. The chapter then thinks of Graham's relationship to quoting, and how quoting might be a way of (re)constructing Graham himself as we do criticism, as we write theses. Through this the thesis intends to reorganise the focus of W. S. Graham's criticism, so that it might begin to include - as well as the phenomenological position of his reader, and how critics go about constructing their chosen writers - Graham's own sense of control over those who encounter his words. Contemporary criticism surrounding Graham makes much room for the reader; but this thesis gives room also for the difficulties of co-habitation, of poet and reader uncomfortably sharing the same space-however briefly that may be.