THE WORLD OF EDWIN MUIR

Abstract

Edwin Muir (1887-) is known in Japan chiefly as the author of incisive critical works, or as the gifted translator of Franz Kafka. But Muir the poet has been rather neglected even in Britain. His reputation is established only recently. His poetry represents what he calls "an age obsessed by the sense of time, or the historical sense." He was born in the Orkneys and brought up "fulfilled and crowned with life as in a parable, as sweetly as gods together bound." The Story and the Fable (1940) is an autobiographical tribute to the blissful memories of this childhood. Nevertheless, the bitterness of youth bowed him down and drove him to the passionate devotion in the works of Nietzsche. Later Kafka redoubled and refined his tragic view of existence and death. From The First Poems (1925), time has been the great protagonist for him. His poetry is indeed what one. of his titles suggests, Variations of Time Theme (1934). Approaching the everyday mysteries through the Scottish imagination, he makes out of them a new system of mythology, where we have an exact image of mankind's position in the universe as he saw it. And his imaginative interpretation will be, with Eliot's, among the finest achievements in Modern English Poetry. Muir's thought moves between two themes, time and eternity. His poetry arises from the tension or the solution of his conflict. The solution is not final but fugitive and once again the tension rises. Therefore his position is on both sides of the conflict: man's side, and God's. This is the very reverse to the seemingly confidence of Eliot. Muir denies to put himself outside time by the Eliotian "dispossession" of worldly preoccupations. He shows little experiment in the technical side. This is also adverse to Eliot's virtuosity. But the firmness of poetic faith encourages his lifelong quest of symbolic expression. We cannot fail to see the immensity of struggle for liberation in and behind his "carnival of life and death." And his last volume, The Labyrinth (1949), calls our special attention by the delicate reconcilliation of Greek necessity with Christian freedom.