RICHARD K. CROSS is Professor of English at the
University of Maryland.
In the course of the past three decades, the
poetry of Edwin Muir (1887-1959) has
fallen into deep neglect, especially on this side
of the Atlantic. Even during his lifetime Muir
was better known as a critic and translator—
he and his wife, Willa, were responsible for
introducing the novels of Kafka and Hermann
Broch to the English-language world—than
he was as a poet. The achievements of a poet
writing in the plain style, as Muir for the most
part did, were easily overlooked amid the
pyrotechnics of T. S. Eliot and the other high
modernists. It is thus something of a surprise
to discover, reading Lyndall Gordon’s biography
of Eliot, that by the mid-1950s Eliot
himself had come to view Muir as the finest
poet then working in Britain.1
Muir never regarded the modernists as his
rivals. For him originality meant not novel
techniques or subject matter but getting
down to spiritual bedrock—meant, as Eliot
has it in “East Coker,” “the fight to recover
what has been lost / And found and lost again
and again.”2 Muir’s search for what he calls
in his Autobiography the “fable,” the pattern
of eternity as it inflects our experience, has
been a source of perplexity for readers of
postmodern inclination, insofar as they are
cognizant of Muir at all. These tend to be the
same people who regard Yeats’s concern
with Indic philosophy or Eliot’s Christianity
as damaging to their poetry. It comes down
to a suspicion of the striving for religious
transcendence and a vehement rejection of
any claim to have attained it. In the best of
Muir’s work the fable and what he refers to
as the “story,” the particulars of our lives in
nature and society, are held in tension, as they
are, for example, in his poem “In Love for
Long” (1946), a paean to the mystery of a
love
like the happy doe
That keeps his perfect laws
Between the tiger’s paws
And vindicates his cause.3
Muir’s own story is bound up with the
complex fate of two small nations, his native
Scotland and Czechoslovakia. The former
had, in effect, ceased to exist as a separate
realm in 1603, when James VI of Scotland
became James I of England. The union of the
crowns—the transplanting of rhyme royal,
named in James’s honor, to London—contributed
greatly to the withering of Scottish
culture, for the absence of a monarch in
Edinburgh meant the dissolution of the literary
life that had grown up around the court.
Although several considerable poets, Burns
and Scott most notably, emerged in the
course of the following centuries, the work of
such isolated figures hardly constituted a
national literature. It was this lack that Muir,
Hugh MacDiarmid, and their confederates
in the early decades of the twentieth century
wished to remedy. At the same time, it was
evident, to Muir at least, that no Scotsman
could sustain himself by writing primarily for
his compatriots. He either had to make a
place for himself in the wider world or starve.
In 1919 Muir left his clerk’s job in
Greenock, on the Clyde estuary, to take up
journalism in London. Two years later he
moved to Prague, where he earned his bread
as a correspondent for British and American
magazines. The leap to the continent was a
bold one for a man with a patchy education—
his formal schooling ended when he
moved from Orkney to the Scottish mainland
at the age of fourteen—and no foreign
languages at his disposal. But it was a classic
stratagem for a writer from the Celtic periphery,
an end-run around the English literary
scene analogous to Joyce’s departure for
Trieste fifteen years earlier. Bohemia and the
other lands that made up Czechoslovakia had
recently emerged from four centuries of
subjection to Hapsburg rule. In those first
years of the Masaryk republic Prague was a
radiant place, with a literary culture that
flourished in both the Czech and German
tongues. Living there opened Muir’s eyes to
the transformation that could take place in a
small country that had been sprung out of an
imperial orbit. “You become aware of the
vitality of the republican idea in Prague as
soon as you enter it,” he observed. “It seems
as if the whole people, old and young, after
being denied all their life any voice in their
political fate, had resolved to enjoy an orgy
of self-government.” Looking back on the
Prague experience across a span of almost
two decades, he recalls that the energy and
hopefulness he had encountered in the Czech
capital made him “wish that Edinburgh
might become a similar place and that Scotland
might become a nation again.”4
Muir’s years in Central Europe were
crucial not only because they afforded him an
opportunity to immerse himself in the culture
of the region but also because they
witnessed his discovery—he was by this time
in his mid-thirties—of his vocation as a poet.
Among the fruits of his sojourn in Czechoslovakia
is a graceful free-verse lyric, “Autumn
in Prague,” technically superior to most of
the other pieces in his First Poems. It concludes
with these lines:
The gossamers forge their cables
Between the grasses,
Secure,
So still the blue air hangs its sea,
That great sea, so still!
The earth like a god,
Far withdrawn,
Lies asleep. (CP 23)
“Autumn in Prague” is a celebration of
latency that anticipates the subsequent unfolding
of Muir’s own powers.
Through the 1920s and early ’30s, while
he was living in London and in various cities
on the continent, Muir did what he could to
keep in touch with Scottish affairs. Only in
1934 did he move back to Scotland for good.
The country was in the depths of the Great
Depression, and the books he wrote in the
years immediately following his return are
correspondingly somber. Scottish Journey
(1935), an inquiry into the economic and
social crisis consuming the land, parallels
Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, which appeared
a year later. In Scott and Scotland (1936)
Muir, reversing field, dismisses the possibility
of the very Scottish literature he had
sought to promote a decade earlier on the
grounds that his countrymen suffered from a
riven sensibility; they had come to think in
English even while they continued to feel
and express emotion in Scots. “The major
forms of poetry rise,” declares Muir, “from
a collision between emotion and intellect on
a plane where both meet on equal terms; and
it can never come into existence where the
poet feels in one language and thinks in
another, even though he should subsequently
translate his thoughts into the language of his
feelings.”5 It is this doubtful argument (how
would one apply it to Yeats and his confrères
in the Irish Renaissance?), spun off from
Eliot’s theory of the dissociation of sensibility
in late seventeenth-century England, that
occasioned the breach with Hugh
MacDiarmid, who had been composing in
Lallans for a decade—to remarkable effect,
as Muir himself acknowledged. For Muir the
point was that, rather than initiating a great
upwelling of literature in Scots, MacDiamid’s
accomplishment was a special case, a brilliant
exception.
Muir’s poems from the 1930s and early
’40s are as harsh in their treatment of Scottish
themes as his prose works from the period.
“Scotland’s Winter” (1935) homes in on a
woman, a miller’s daughter, who
With frozen fingers soldered to her basket
Seems to be knocking
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And all the kings before
This land was kingless,
And all the singers before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living
waits the Judgment Day. (CP 229)
A poem composed a few years later,
“Scotland 1941,” is an out-and-out jeremiad.
“We were a tribe, a family, a people,”
it begins. “Courage beyond the point and
obdurate pride / Made us a nation, robbed
us of a nation.” The poem ridicules any
pretense to a vital Scottish literary tradition
and deplores the country’s descent into the
vortex of getting and spending. Burns and
Scott are seen as the
sham bards of a sham nation,
And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in
riches,
No pride but pride of pelf. (CP 97)
And while he is in the business of laying
about himself, the poet goes on to castigate
the Reformers John Knox and Andrew
Melville. Muir considers their Calvinism to
have warped the Scottish character—the
sort of Scottishness one encounters in the
ballads or in the poetry of Robert Henryson—
as it had existed prior to the Reformation.
The incursion of Calvinism into Scotland he
sees as a disaster no less significant than the
demise of national sovereignty. In “The
Incarnate One” (1954), he declares:
The Word made flesh here is made
word again
A word made word in flourish and
arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron
pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and
bent
Into an ideological argument.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Abstract calamity, save for those who
can
Build their cold empire on the abstract
man.(CP 228)
Ideology has here its original connotation
of false consciousness. Muir detests not only
the Calvinist notion of an all-too-transcendent
deity but the degradation of the flesh,
and of feeling, it entails.
The passages I have quoted might suggest
that Muir had himself lapsed into a frigid
attitude vis-à-vis his country. And there are
in fact times, as he confesses in “The Difficult
Land,” “When name, identity, and our very
hands, / Senselessly labouring, grow most
hateful to us.” But this is hardly his final view
of the matter. “We have such hours,” he
continues,
but are drawn back again
By faces of goodness, faithful masks of
sorrow,
Honesty, kindness, courage, fidelity.
The love that lasts a life’s time. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . For how can we reject
The long last look on the ever-dying face
Turned backward from the other side of
time?
And how offend the dead and shame the
living
By these despairs? And how refrain from
love?
This is a difficult country, and our home.
(CP 237-238)
The poems I have been discussing are
representative instances of Muir’s practice of
thinking in verse—”a very different thing,”
as R. P. Blackmur observes, “from versifying
thought, for the verse is the vital mode
rather than the mere mode of thought in
verse and is thus the substance of what we
remember as well as the memorable form.”6
Readers who prefer a less discursive poetry
will be glad to know that Muir is capable
of effective dramatic verse as well. Consider,
for example, the blank verse poem “Troy”
(1937), in which the story, entirely of Muir’s
invention, and the hereditary fable, centering
on a colossal fall, approach one another
intimately. Amid the sewers of the ruined
city dwells
a man so venerable
He might have been Priam’s self, but
Priam was dead,
Troy taken. His arms grew meagre as a
boy’s,
And all that flourished in that hollow
famine
Was his long, white, round beard. Oh,
sturdily
He swung his staff and sent the bold rats
skipping
Across the scurfy hills and worm-wet
valleys,
Crying: ‘Achilles, Ajax, turn and fight!
Stop cowards!’ Till his cries, dazed and
confounded,
Flew back at him with: ‘Coward, turn
and fight!’
And the wild Greeks yelled round him.
Yet he withstood them, a brave, mad old
man,
And fought the rats for Troy.
In the end a “chance robber”—”chance”
in that his actions lie athwart the fable rather
than running along its grain—drags the old
man to the surface where he sees “Troy like
a burial ground,”
The sky, the sea, Mount Ida and the
islands,
No sail from edge to edge, the Greeks
clean gone.
They stretched him on a rock and
wrenched his limbs,
Asking: ‘Where is the treasure?’ till he
died. (CP 71)
The poem’s triumph lies in its compounding
pathos, fortitude, and a touch of
sanctity (that round white beard suggests an
aureole, albeit an inverted one) in a fashion
that invites us to view the old man’s predicament
as being—despite, or even because of,
its absurdity—akin to Lear’s, whose madness
is likewise an affair of nobility at odds with
circumstance. The knowledge the protagonist
takes with him to the grave is of a
treasure that would be of no interest to the
brigands, for the real splendor of Troy resides
not in her opulence but in the
greatheartedness of her champions, among
whom the old man is at last himself numbered.
Muir returned to the matter of Troy
in half a dozen poems appearing across a span
of more than twenty years, very possibly
because this ancient narrative of the defeat
and repression of a people had special resonance
for him as a Scotsman. It is but a short
step from Hector to Robert the Bruce and
the other heroes of the Scottish nation—
Bruce who “outfaced three English kings /
And kept a people’s faith” (“Robert the
Bruce,” CP 116).
In his Autobiography Muir offers a moving
account of a journey in the fall of 1945
through burnt-out Germany to Prague,
where he was to take up duties as the British
Council representative. Prague, which had
not been bombed or fought over as had other
Central European capitals, remained physically
intact, but the ebullience of twenty
years earlier was missing. With the ravaging
of Lidice and other atrocities still fresh in
their minds, the Czechs were understandably
apprehensive about what might befall
their country next. It took them less than
three years to find out. Muir had argued in
a 1934 essay, “Bolshevism and Calvinism,”
that, radically different as were the objectives
of the two creeds, communism resembled
Calvinism structurally in its determinism,
ruthless rationality, and hostility to
tradition and romance—all “qualities that
cut clean through the complexity of life and
custom and deliberately exclude everything
which is useless or distracting or inimical to
themselves. . . . If Communism triumphs,”
he went on to say, “there will be no returning
to the old European tradition.”7 Although he
had been a socialist from his early days in
Glasgow, Muir’s socialism was closer to that
of William Morris than to Marx. Now he
found himself living through the events that
were to cut the Czech lands off from Europe—
Europe as both he and the Czechs
understood it—for the next forty years.
Muir’s last two collections, The Labyrinth
(1949) and One Foot in Eden (1956), contain
a number of poems dealing with the communist
putsch and its fallout, among them
“The Good Town,” “The Border,” “The
Interrogation,” and “The Cloud”—poems
in which, as Seamus Heaney observes, he
developed a rhetoric “elegiac and yet politically
purposeful.”8 In the most overtly anticommunist
of these poems, “The Cloud”
(1955), the speaker, en route to a literary
conference in the Bohemian countryside,
loses his way
In a maze of little winding roads that led
To nothing but themselves[.]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
At a sudden turn we saw
A young man harrowing, hidden in dust;
he seemed
A prisoner walking in a moving cloud
Made by himself for his own purposes;
And there he grew and was as if exalted
To more than man, yet not, not glorified:
A pillar of dust moving in dust, no more.
(CP 245)
At the Writers’ House the poet encounters
a “preacher,” a latter-day, secular counterpart
of Knox and Melville, who has come
from the melancholy land of Urania—the
name, deriving from the wounded Titan
Uranus, suggests a violent rift between generations—
to proclaim the dialectical materialist
evangel. The preacher praises “the
good dust, man’s ultimate salvation.” Muir
will have none of it. As he sees it, the Marxist
attempt to exalt man into “more than man”
has had the reverse effect. The cloud that
envelops the young harrower may look like
an aura, but what the speaker witnesses is a
mock-transfiguration; the dust is but dust—
and man, deprived of his proper soul, no
more than a quintessence of dust. The poet is
not, however, willing to let so baleful an
estimate of the human lot go unchallenged:
thinking of the man
Hid in his cloud we longed for light to
break
And show that his face was the face once
broken in Eden
Beloved, world-without-end lamented
face;
And not a blindfold mask on a pillar of
dust. (CP 246)
Not many writers would have dared these
last lines, straight from the fable.
“The Horses” (1955), which follows “The
Cloud” in One Foot in Eden, is shadowed by
the ultimate thunderhead. A “seven days’
war,” presumably a clash between rival power
blocs, devastates all the urban centers. But for
a farming community on a remote seacoast—
one easily imagines it pertaining to
Muir’s native Orkney—the week of decreation
represents a new beginning. The
peasants find themselves released from an
order whose oppressiveness they recognize
only when its hold over them has been
shattered:
The radios failed; we turned the knobs;
no answer.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And still they stand in corners of our
kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a
million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should
speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should
speak,
We would not listen. (CP 246)
The civilization that overhung their lives
and, in the manner of Kronos, “swallowed its
children quick / At one great gulp,” has
spewed them out again. The villagers’ disposition
to mythologize —they see the tractors
rusting in their fields as “dank sea-monsters
couched and waiting,” figures in a cautionary
tale—is crucial to the identity they now
assume, or rather take up once more, since
for them the way back is the way forward.
Gradually they renew their bond with the
nature—most critically, their own elemental
nature—from which they have become estranged.
A decisive step in this process is the
mysterious return of the horses, among them
some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the
broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their
own Eden. (CP 247)
These are “fabulous steeds”—like us creatures
of the sixth day, but creatures that have
never known the Fall—come to resume their
“long-lost archaic companionship” with man
and restore the perennial scale of being. It
seems perverse to look for the silver lining in
a mushroom cloud; nevertheless, in Muir’s
world good is more fundamental than evil,
capable of redeeming it. As apocalyptic
pastoral, “The Horses,” composed in the
zero winter of the cold war, represents a
striking expression of the poet’s faith in
human prospects.
Muir’s experience of totalitarianism in
Prague seems to have left him more or less
resigned to the soft imperialism practiced in
the extremities of the United Kingdom; the
yearning for an independent Scotland expressed
in the 1940 version of his autobiography
is omitted from the revised edition
that appeared in 1954. He would most likely
have approved of devolution, the mild form
of home rule that has emerged in Scotland in
recent years, even if there are few signs of its
giving rise to a major cultural resurgence.
But it is the end of communism—the tempest
blowing itself out—that offers a far more
potent justification of Muir’s essential hopefulness.
He would have been especially gratified
by the manner in which the Czechs, for
so long caught “between the tiger’s paws,”
were able to vindicate their cause and be
restored to Europe.
NOTES
- Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New
York: Norton, 1998), 468. Eliot’s opinion is noted by
his friend Mary Trevelyan in a diary entry of 1 November
1956. In his preface to Muir’s Selected Poems (London:
Faber, 1965), 9-10, Eliot speaks of the Scotsman as “this
shy man of genius” whose poems “have added glory to
the English language.” It is worth noting that Eliot had
by this time come to regard Auden as an American poet,
thereby bracketing Muir’s chief competitor. - T. S.
Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt,
1963), 189. - . Edwin Muir, Collected Poems1921-1958
(London: Faber, 1960), 159. I cite the Faber edition rather
than The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, ed. Peter Butter
(Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies,
1991), since it is the volume more readily available in
libraries. Subsequent page references will appear in
parentheses preceded by CP. - Edwin Muir, The Story
and the Fable (London: Harrap, 1940), 224, 228. - Edwin
Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish
Writer (London: Routledge, 1936), 19. - R. P. Blackmur,
“Edwin Muir,” in Four Poets on Poetry, ed. Don Cameron
Allen (1959; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980), 33. -
Edwin Muir, “Bolshevism and Calvinism,” European
Quarterly 1.1 (1934), 7- 9. - Seamus Heaney, “The Place
of Edwin Muir, Verse 6.1 (1989), 32