This chapter introduces the notion of ‘lyric self-consciousness’ in the context of W. S. Graham’s poetry, letters and annotations. It begins by tracing critical responses to Graham, and the charge of solipsism levelled at his self-reflexivity. Developments in lyric theory are applied to Graham’s propositions about the self-conscious (or ‘selfconscious’) poet: in particular, Jonathan Culler’s account of the ‘literary unconscious’ that emerges in the act of critical reading. Graham’s verse experiments are characterised as modernist attempts to encode elements of literary subjectivity into technique and process, expressed through an ambivalent relation to verse form.