Scottish Authors > Edwin Muir Poet & Novelist 1887-1959

Born in 1887 in Orkney, in childhood Edwin Muir experienced "Eden" before, aged fourteen, encountering the "fallen" world when circumstances forced his family to move to Glasgow. In four years, death seized both parents and two of Muir's five siblings, deepening his sense of the gulf between the Orkneys and the city and causing a nervous perturbation which shadowed his life and shaped his work.

By 1919, Muir had married Willa Anderson, a happy partnership recorded in her loving memoir Belonging (1968), and moved to London where persisting psychological distress led him to Jungian analysis. A vision in which he was witness to the Creation inspired him fully to engage in his own "creation" as a poet. Indeed, experience made him see human life in such terms, individual "story" re-enacting archetypal "fable", loss of childhood innocence a reworking of man's expulsion from Eden.

His world is full of paradox, good coexisting with evil, living with dying, love with hate, leading to images of journeys, of roads, of labyrinths:

There is a road that turning always

Cuts off the country of Again.

Time looms large, pregnant with intimations of death:

Time with his hour glass and his scythe

Stood dreaming on the dial ...

whilst the poet suffers the strangeness of it all, invoking images of agrarian childhood:

Can we till these nameless fields,

Nameless ourselves, between the impotent dead

And the unborn ...

and feels alienated even from himself:

Packed in my skin form head to toe

Is one I know and do not know.

In addition to seven collections of poems (1925-1956), now published together in The Complete poems of Edwin Muir (1991), Muir wrote three novels (1927-1932), while Willa translated Kafka and taught in Europe before coming in 1935 to St. Andrews, where he produced his controversial assessment of Scottish culture Scott and Scotland. Attacking what he had once approved of, "synthetic Scots" as used by MacDiarmid, Muir's thesis was that while Scotland was torn between Lallans and English, she would fail to produce great literature.

In English and in conventional verse forms Muir expressed the emotions of one who saw fable in every story and timelessness all-pervasive. Unhappiness at exile from Eden and life amid paradox finally left Muir in 1950 when, as recalled in An Autobiography (1954), he became Warden of Newbattle Abbey and found peace by inspiring its adult students.

Muir died in 1959 and is buried near Cambridge; a memorial seat in the Pentland Hills recalls Muir's achievements.

Mary Ross

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