Edwin Muir

Grave of Edwin Muir (1887-1959), Swaffam Prior. Photo by John Sutton, 2011 (cropped). Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0), courtesy Wikimedia Commons].

Edwin Muir (15 May 1887 - 3 January 1959) was an Orcadian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator. He is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations.

Life

Muir was born in and raised on a farm near Deerness, on the Orkney Islands, Hacco (remembered in his autobiography as "Haco"},, where his mother had also been born.

In 1901, when he was 14, his father lost his farm, and the family moved to Glasgow. In quick succession his father, 2 brothers, and his mother died within the space of a few years. His life as a young man was a depressing experience, and involved a raft of unpleasant jobs in factories and offices, including working in a factory that turned bones into charcoal. "He suffered psychologically in a most destructive way, although perhaps the poet of later years benefited from these experiences as much as from his Orkney 'Eden'."

In 1919, Muir married Willa Anderson, and the couple moved to London. About this, Muir wrote simply 'My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life'. They would later collaborate on highly acclaimed English translations of such writers as Franz Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, Sholem Asch, Heinrich Mann, and Hermann Broch.

Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924.

Between 1925 and 1956, he published 7 volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published 3 novels, and in 1935 he came to the University of St. Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).

From 1946 to 1949 he was Director of the British Council in Prague and Rome. 1950 saw his appointment as Warden of Newbattle Abbey College (a college for working class men) in Midlothian, where he met fellow Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown. In 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvard University.

He returned to Britain in 1956 but died in 1959 at Swaffham Prior, Cambridge, and was buried there.

Recognition

A memorial bench to Moore was erected in 1962 to Muir in the idyllic village of Swanston, Edinburgh, where he spent time during the 1950s.

His poetry was included in the New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950.

Writing

His childhood in remote and unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic Eden to Muir, while his family's move to the city corresponded in his mind to a deeply disturbing encounter with the "fallen" world. The emotional tensions of that dichotomy shaped much of his work and deeply influenced his life. His psychological distress led him to undergo Jungian analysis in London. A vision in which he witnessed the creation strengthened the Edenic myth in his mind, leading him to see his life and career as the working-out of an archetypal fable. In his Autobiography he wrote, "the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man...". He also expressed his feeling that our deeds on Earth constitute "a myth which we act almost without knowing it." Alienation, paradox, the existential dyads of good and evil, life and death, love and hate, and images of journeys, labyrinths, time and places fill his work.

His Scott and Scotland advanced the claim that Scotland can create a national literature only by writing in English, an opinion that placed him in direct opposition to the Lallans movement of Hugh MacDiarmid. He had little sympathy for Scottish nationalism.

In 1965 a volume of his selected poetry was edited and introduced by T.S. Eliot. Many of Edwin and Willa Muir's translations of German novels are still in print.

The following quotation expresses the basic existential dilemma of Muir's life:

"I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937-39.)

Publications

Main article: Edwin Muir bibliography

Poetry

• First Poems. London: Hogarth Press, 1925; New York: Huebsch, 1925.
• Chorus of the Newly Dead. London: Hogarth Press, 1926.
• Six Poems. Warlingham, Surrey: Samson, 1932.
• Variations on a Time Theme: London: Dent, 1934.
• Journeys and Places. London: Dent, 1937.
• The Narrow Place. London: Faber, 1943.
• The Voyage, and other poems. London: Faber, 1946.
• The Labyrinth. London: Faber and Faber, 1949; Folcroft, PA; Folcroft Library Editions, 1977.
• Collected Poems, 1921-1951 (edited by J.C. Hall). London:Faber, 1952; New York: Grove, 1953.
• Prometheus (illustrated by John Piper). London: Faber, 1954.
• One Foot in Eden. London: Faber and Faber, 1956; New York: Grove Press, 1956.
• Collected Poems (edited by J.C. Hall and Willa Muir). London: Faber, 1962.
  • London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
• Selected Poems (edited by T.S. Eliot). Faber, 1965, 1974.
• Complete Poems (edited by Peter H. Butter). Aberdeen, Scotland: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1991.

Novels

• The Marionette. London: Hogarth Press, 1927; New York: Viking 1927
  • (with an afterword by Paul Binding). London: Hogarth Press, 1987.
• The Three Brothers. London: Heinemann, 1931; New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1931.
• Poor Tom. London: Dent, 1932.
  • (with an introduction by Peter H. Butter). Edinburgh, Scotland: Harris, 1982.

Literary Criticism

• We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses (as Edward Moore). London: George Allen & Unwin, 1918
  • (as Edwin Muir). New York: Knopf, 1920.
• Latitudes. London: A. Melrose, 1924; New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1924; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
• Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature. London: Hogarth Press, 1926; New York: Viking, 1926; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976; Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1977.
  • Philadelphia, PA: R. West, 1978.
• The Structure of the Novel. London: Hogarth Press, 1928; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929; London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
• Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer. London: Routledge, 1936; New York: Speller, 1938; Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 1982.
• The Present Age from 1914 (Volume 5 of "Introductions to English Literature", edited by Bonamy Dobree). London: Cresset Press, 1939; New York: McBride, 1977; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978.
• The Politics of King Lear (lecture), Jackson (Glasgow, Scotland), 1947.; New York: Haskell House, 1970; Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977.
• Essays on Literature and Society, London, Hogarth Press, 1949.
  • revised & enlarged, London: Hogarth Press, 1965; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
• The Estate of Poetry. London: Hogarth Press, 1962; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1962; St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1993.
• Uncollected Scottish Criticism (edited by Andrew Noble). London: Vision Press, 1982, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982.
• The Truth of Imagination: Some uncollected reviews and essays (edited by Peter H. Butter). Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press, 1988.

The Castle by Edwin Muir (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• List of British poets
• List of literary critics

External links

Poems

• Edwin Muir 1887-1959 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Edwin Muir at PoemHunter (23 poems)

Books

• Edwin Muir at Amazon.com

About

• "Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Translator" (website)
• Edwin Muir's Journey by Robert Richman (essay)
• Edwin Muir at Poets' Graves