(A part-reactionary, part-Nietzschean attack upon the dise...)
A part-reactionary, part-Nietzschean attack upon the diseases of modernity, Edwin Muir's intellectually thrilling and enigmatic book of observations and aphorisms is a work deserving of more notice.
Edwin Muir was a Scottish novelist, essayist and critic. Muir is also remembered as the translator who first brought the works of Franz Kafka to an English-speaking audience.
Background
Edwin Muir was born on May 15, 1887, in Deemess, Orkney, Scotland. He was the son of James Muir, a tenant farmer, and Elizabeth Cormack Muir, a tenant farmer.
Muir was the youngest of six children in a tenant farming family that worked a succession of farms in the Orkney Islands before high rents drove them to Glasgow in search of more secure financial prospects in 1901. The transition from an agricultural life, closely tied to ancient traditions and the cycles of nature, to an industrial and commercial life in Glasgow, was devastating to the family, and Muir’s father, mother, and two brothers died within five years of the move. Muir himself later compared the psychological fracture he experienced to an episode of time travel.
Education
From 1895-1901, Muir attended grammar school near Kirkwall, Orkney Islands.
Career
In Glasgow, with little formal education, the fourteen- year-old Muir began work as an office clerk and subsequently held various positions, including a stint in a local bone factory. He began writing poetry in 1913, and quickly found publication in the New Age. However, he ceased writing poetry within a couple of years, turning instead to journalism.
His marriage to Wilhelmina “Willa” Anderson, a teacher and linguist, represented for Muir the most important event of his life, as his wife encouraged him to move to London, to pursue a career in journalism, and to undergo a course of psychoanalysis in order to grapple with fears and guilt related to his disrupted youth and the deaths in his immediate family. Muir was hired as an assistant editor for the New Age, and he later contributed reviews to such periodicals as the Athenaeum, the Scotsman, and the Freeman.
In 1921 the Muirs began an extended stay on the Continent, living first in Prague, and later in Dresden, Salzburg, and Vienna. Throughout the 1920s Muir gained a wide reputation as a critic, with such works as Latitudes and The Structure of the Novel, and he began a series of collaborations with his wife on translations of the works of Gerhart Hauptmann, Franz Kafka, and Lion Feucht- wanger, among others. His works of poetry during this period included First Poems and Chorus of the Newly Dead. The Muirs returned to England in 1927 - the same year that Muir’s first novel, The Marionette, was published - and took up residence in Surrey. Over the next two decades they lived variously in England and Scotland. With a well-established career as a critic and translator providing security, Muir undertook a series of projects during the 1930s, including a biography of the Calvinist leader, John Knox, the autobiographical novels The Three Brothers and Poor Tom, poetry in Variations on a Time Theme, travel and history writing in Scottish Journey, and political pamphleteering in Social Credit and the Labor Party: An Appeal.
In 1941 Muir accepted a position in Edinburgh with the British Council and was assigned to Prague in 1945 and Rome in 1949. The 1940s encompassed a period of heightened poetic output for Muir, with such works as The Narrow Place, The Voyage, and Other Poems, and The Labyrinth. He returned to Scotland in 1950 when he was named warden of Newbattle Abbey College. He spent one year teaching at Harvard University in the mid-1950s and then returned to England where he continued to write, completing his final poetry collection, One Foot in Eden, in 1956. Muir died at Swaffham Prior, near Cambridge, in 1959.
Muir’s poetry is not poetry for poetry’s sake, it develops an argument about time, which, it strikes one, might have been developed in a prose thesis or in an imaginative fiction. Yet in his poetry Edwin Muir has discovered a language which expresses this argument in the most vivid and direct way possible by means of an imagery so precise that the prose meaning would seem a circuitous way of describing what can be held instantaneously by a single poetic image.
In his one extended critical analysis, The Structure of the Novel, Muir identified and discussed such major forms as the novel of action, the character novel, the dramatic novel, and the chronicle novel.
Throughout his career Muir advocated a close connection between literature and life, and thus rejected much of New Criticism with its close reading of poetry. In his view it tended to distance the poet from the audience. In one of his most controversial works, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer, Muir offended nationalists with his assertion that Scottish literature would be better served by the use of the English language, rather than Scots Gaelic.
Muir did not share in the modern attempts to deify poetry, or language, or even the human imagination. Implicit in all of his works is the recognition that there are things more important than literature - life and love, the physical world, the individual spirit within its body: those things in which the religious man recognizes the immediate work of God. Muir’s triumph was less in the techno-logical realm of communication than in the vastly more difficult realm of sensitivity, perception, wisdom, the things which he communicated. It was a triumph made possible only, in the familiar paradox, by humility.
Personality
Because Edwin Muir remained outside the main currents of modern poetry and criticism throughout his career, Muir did not create a sensation as a young man, nor did he enter the literary establishment easily through his association with other writers of the period. Instead, his critical reputation and popularity grew steadily as his poetic skills developed, culminating in numerous awards and honors that paid homage to his immense contributions to British literature. Early critics of his poetry praised his evocation of mood and noted his reliance on traditional poetic methods and structures. Late in his life, commentators recognized his singular achievement and drew attention to the close relation of Muir’s autobiography to his poetry. Examining the body of his work, reviewers and academic critics of the 1960s and 1970s identified such key subjects and themes as time, the journey, innocence and experience, and the randomness of evil, and drew attention to Muir’s use of myth and imagery from heraldic tradition.
Quotes from others about the person
“Time does not fade Muir’s poems, and it becomes clear that their excellence owes nothing to the accidental circumstances of the moment at which the poet wrote, or we read, his poems; they survive, as it were, a change of background, and we begin to see that whereas the ‘new’ movements of this or that decade lose their significance when the scene changes and retain only a historical interest, Edwin Muir, a poet who never followed fashion, has in fact given more permanent expression to his world than other poets who deliberately set out to be the mouth-pieces of their generation.” - Kathleen Raine
"Muir’s themes are the traditional themes of the great poets, from Homer’s time to the present: the struggle between good and evil in the individual, in society, in the universe; the loss of innocence and the quest for its recovery; the nature of human destiny; the destructiveness of time; the enduring joy and power of love. At the same time, Muir has had the strength to handle this traditional material in his own way, on his own terms.” - Elizabeth Huberman
“Muir will remain among the poets who have added glory to the English language. He is also one of the poets of whom Scotland should always be proud.” - T. S. Eliot
Connections
On June 7, 1919, Edwin Muir married Wilhelmina “Willa” Anderson, a teacher and linguist. They had a son, Gavin.