Edwin Muir, poet, critic and novelist, was one of the leading contributors to the modern Scottish Renaissance, a movement which was at its height in the interwar years and which sought to revive Scottish writing and promote a national self-confidence. Yet, despite this association with the movement and, through that with writers such as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, Muir's poetic style and political viewpoint were markedly divergent from the Renaissance norm. Controversially rejecting MacDiarmid's call for the promotion of Scots language poetry and political nationalism, Muir argued, in his 1936 study Scott and Scotland, that Scotland must accept English as the language of its literature. This belief is reflected throughout his collected poetry which, despite his upbringing in Orkney and Glasgow, is written in an English suggestive of a knowledge of contemporary modernists such as Eliot and Pound. Furthermore, his work largely avoids the stylistic innovation associated with poetry of the Renaissance and, for this reason, it is necessary to view his work in a context that is European as much as it is Scottish.
Muir's early poetry, which includes First Poems (1925) and Variations on a Time Theme (1934), is heavily informed by memories of his Orkney childhood, and the pre-lapsarian (or Edenic) idyll which he associated with it. The life-shattering contrast he experienced between this rural vision and the hellish reality of industrial Glasgow is detailed in his autobiography, first published as The Story and the Fable (1940), a text which many readers find useful as an introduction to the recurring personal themes of his other writings.
Indicative of this early period is 'Childhood', a poem from First Poems which, written in the regular four line stanza of the Scottish ballad form, is reassuring in both its regularity and simplicity. In style, it is reminiscent of Blake's Songs of Innocence, while some readers perceive an affinity with Wordsworth in his evocation of childhood. Its structural simplicity reflects, from the archaic suggestion of 'Long time he lay', a security of belonging, distantly remembered from an adult perspective. Encapsulating the safe and timeless quality of the memory are phrases such as 'securely bound', 'tranquil air' and 'still light'. The speaker is encircled and protected, both by his parents, who are present in the first and last lines of the poem, and by nature itself in the life-like rocks which 'sleep round him where he lay'. While the outside world is suggested by the 'new shores' and alliterative description of a passing ship, it does not impose itself on the peaceful vision and barely hints at the external horrors that will later so shatteringly force their way into Muir's consciousness.
The later poetry, from The Narrow Place (1943) to his final collection One Foot in Eden (1956), is considered his most mature and accomplished. This period is also, for the most part, more positive in outlook than his early work, although, paradoxically, the most anthologised poem of this group, 'The Horses', deals with his fears for the Cold War and his growing realisation of the nuclear age. Echoing and subverting the seven-day creation in Genesis, the poem depicts the aftermath of an unspecified world war which has rendered useless the machinery and illusory benefits of the modern age. The dumb radios and obsolete planes and tractors force the survivors to remember an older way of life, long abandoned; their return to the plough seen as the revitalisation of a lost communion between man and the world, 'Far past our fathers' land'. While the poem is not formally arranged in two parts, it is effectively read as such, with the first thirty lines depicting the world laid waste to atomic ruin, and the second section offering new beginnings, symbolised by the return of the horses of the poem's title.
The arrival of the horses is heralded by their alliterative soundings, first a 'tapping', growing to a 'deepening drumming' and then 'hollow thunder', before bursting into the silence with the promise of cyclical regeneration. The anticipation of their appearance is further heightened by the pause, 'We saw the heads/Like a wild wave charging'. This vision of the horses as 'fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield', emphasises their mythical qualities, symbolic of both Muir's Orkney and of a timeless knowledge. Through re-found co-operation with the mysterious beasts, 'that long-lost archaic companionship', there is hope for recovery and a meaningful future, acknowledged in the final line, 'their coming our beginning'.
Less well known are Muir's three novels, The Marrionette (1927), The Three Brothers (1931) and Poor Tom (1932), the last two of which explore, in different guises, the traumatic experience of early industrial Glasgow. Muir's primary identification with Orkney leads him to characterise Scotland as 'my second country' and two further texts which deal directly with this are Scott and Scotland, referred to above, and Scottish Journey (1935), an unusual volume of travel writing in which he explores Scotland's Calvinist inheritance with often unflattering portraits of the Scottish land and people. Muir's collected poetry is available as Collected Poems (1991), edited by Peter Butter.
