The Poems of Edwin Muir and

Their Relationship to Modernism

Elgin W. Mellown
Duke University
Edwin Muir has received the critical treatment appropriate to an
acknowledged literary figure, yet he remains something of an enigma to
historians. Readers do not automatically turn to his writings as they do to the
works of his peers Viriginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. His criticism, except for
The Structure of the Novel, has not been reprinted. And while the Norton
anthologies provide selections of representative poems, other introductory
anthologies give only a few, if any, of them.
Is time simply making its pronouncement on Edwin Muir? When he died
in 1959he had won a modestbut undisputedpositionacknowledgedby his
fellow artists, and he has continued to win new readers, who find him an
immensely satisfying poet. Actually time has not delivered its verdict, but has
rather been unable to find the correct historical pigeonhole in which to place
him. And since time, like the orthodox academician, can do nothing with a
topic until its place in the overall organization has been determined, Edwin
Muir has been relegated to the end of the chapter or critical survey-or
ignored.
My aim in this essay is to put forward a way in which we may view Muir
in relationship to the important artistic movement of modernism in order that
we may gain a more accurate estimate of his position in the annals of

twentieth-centuryliterature.

Edwin Muir was born in 1887,in the Orkney Islands, the youngest son of
a crofter's family. His schooling on the island ended in 1901when his family
moved to Glasgow, where the older children had found employment and
where he himself began to work as ajunior clerk at the age offourteen. Butthe
simple farm family, coming from a situation that resembled that of the
agrarian eighteenth century, was not able to adapt to life in the industrialized
city, and within a few years both the mother and father had died, as well as
two of the older brothers. By the age of eighteen Edwin was livingon hisown
and supporting himself. Like other ambitious young men of the period, he
educated himself by independent reading and study. During the first world
war he worked as a costing clerk in the Glasgow shipyards.

"l.

He began to write for the London weekly newspaper, the New Age, and
published a collection of aphorisms and short essaysas a book in 1918.About
the same time he met Willa Anderson, a young woman from the Shetlands
who had taken a degree in classicsat St. Andrews. They were married in 1919;
and, encouraged by his wife, Edwin went to London to be a professional
journalist. He was then thirty-two years old. He soon received so many
assignments and commissions from both London and New York editors that
he was able to support Willaand himself by his free-lancewritings. They went
to central Europe where for the first time in his life he had leisure in which to
express his original ideas through verse and prose.
He and Willa also began translating German novels and soon gained a
reputation as translators of both best-sellers and of highlyinfluential works of
art, the most important of these being Franz Kafka's novels and tales which
the Muirs presented to the English-speaking world. This translating helped to
make Muir an internationalist who deliberately chose English for his own
writings because it offered him the richest literary tradition.
In 1939 with the outbreak of war the Muirs experienced many personal
hardships and financial difficulties, but at the same time Edwin underwent a
sort of mental breakthrough, an understanding of life brought about by his
realization that he was a Christian and also by his examination of hislife in his
autobiography The Story and the Fable. This psychological development
allowed him to write the poems on which his literary reputation rests. From
the early 19405to the mid-50s he was associated with the British Council as a
teacher and administrator. He was the Norton Professor of Poetry at
Harvard in 1955 and a guest lecturer at several of the British universities
before his death in 1959.
Muir pu~lished over thirty volumes: literary and philosophical essays,
biographies and novels, collections of verses, even travel books. With Willa
Muir he translated well over thirty additional volumes. There are thousands
of uncollected newspaper reviews and critical essays. Muir first achieved
recognition in them as a critic and promoter of the new writers of the time.
These pieces include the long-continuing book-reviews for the Listener, the
Scotsman, the Observer, and other highbrow periodicals, for he was indeed a
respected and influential authority on modern literature for over three
decades.
.
Yet in spite of these millions of words, the relatively fewpoems determine
Muir's artistic rank, and of these, it is actually the post-l 943 verse which is
most significant. These poems appear in The Narrow Place, which was
followed in 1945by The Voyage and in 1949by The Labyrinth. Most poets
write their most important poems as young men-and go down hill from then
on. But Muir's last poems, those published in One Foot in Eden in 1956and in
the posthumous Collected Poems confirm his fame as a poet.

Here ..are two typical, late poems. The first is entitled "The Return of

Odysseus.

The doors flapped open in Odysseus' house,

The lolling latches gave to every hand,
Let traitor, babbler, tout and bargainer in.
The rooms and passages resounded
With ease and chaos of a public market,
The walls mere walls to lean on as you talked,
Spat on the floor, surveyed some newcomer
With an absent eye. There you could be yourself.
Dust in the nooks, weeds nodding in the yard,
The thick walls crumbling. Even the cattle came
About the doors with mild familiar stare

As if this weretheir place.

All round the island stretched the clean blue sea.

Sole at the house's heart Penelope
Sat at her chosen task, endless undoing
Of endless doing, endless weaving, unweaving,
In the clean chamber. Still her loom ran empty
Day after day. She thought: 'here I do nothing
Or less than nothing, making an emptiness
Amid disorder, weaving, unweaving the lie
The day demands. Odysseus, this is duty,
To do and undo, to keep a vacant gate
Where order and right and hope and peace can enter.
Oh will you ever return? Or are you dead,
And this wrought emptiness my ultimate emptiness?'
She wove and unwove and wove and did not know
That even then Odysseus on the long
And winding road of the world was on his way.
Here is the dedicatory poem of the first part of One Foot in Eden. It is an
Italian sonnet entitled simply "Milton":
Milton, his face set fair for Paradise,
And knowing that he and Paradise were lost
In separate desolation, bravely crossed
Into his second night and paid his price.
There towards the end he to the dark tower came
Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone
Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown
From a great funnel filled with roaring flame.

Shut in his darkness, these he could not see,

But heard the steely c1amour known too well
On Saturday nights in every street in Hell.
Where past the devilish din, could Paradise be?
A footstep more, and his unblinding eyes
Saw far and near the fields of Paradise.
These poems are obviously not typical of the verse written in the 1940sand
'fifties. Where should the historian place their author?
An answer may come from observing Muir's birth year and his
chronologicalcontemporaries.The year 1887saw the birth of the novelist
Sheila Kaye-Smith, of the biographer Hesketh Pearson, of the scientific
writer Julian Huxley, of the poet Edith Sitwell, and of the epitome of all
patriotic war poets, Rupert Brooke. A diverse group! and it expands if we
consider the entire decade. The vintage year is 1882,for then were born the
modernist writers Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson.
And 1888 is the birthyear of other modernists: T.S. Eliot, Joyce Cary, and
Katherine Mansfield. Not all writers born in the '80s proved to be modernists,
but most of the modernists were born in this decade; and their work provides
reasonable standards for their contemporaries. I am of course considering
only the British authors since the Continental writers lived and worked under
different conditions and traditions. Let me point out also that while the term
modernism has many drawbacks, it is the term used by literary historians for
those writings of a particular sort which appeared shortly before the first
world war and which were not often written much later than the end of the
second war; and so I must continue to use the term.
There are many definitions of modernism. Harry Levin's is almost
epigrammatic:"The fusion of realism and symbolism." It is a sound definition,
but I want to remind you of some of the actual characteristics of modernist
writing. The modernist author uses his personal experiences through forms
having a general-even universal-significance. He considers his experienceto
represent or enact a universal situation or myth, and he carefully selects a
mythic form, or a previously used literary form, through which he may
express his personal truth. There is a reciprocal activity: the writer in one
sense interprets the ancient myth for his own generation, while at the same
time the ancient myth animates the writer's experience. James Joyce's Ulysses
exemplifies the principle: the pre-Christian story of the heroic exploits of
Odysseus comes alive in terms peculiar to the twentieth-century western
world, while the idiosyncratic ideas and activities of Joyce's Leopold Bloom
gain universal significancefrom their association with the Homeric structure
and form. This re-interpretation of older forms may stem from the fact that
the modernist writers are generally self-conscious transvaluators of values,
and their use of older forms for their own purposes is at once constructive and

destructive. The rebellious attitudes which we associate with Nietzsche

extend even to the writers' attitudes to time. They feel helpless in the fixed
movements of clock time, and hence they set out to destroy the chronology
which governs the lives of most mortals by structuring their works of art
around another sort of time. Frequently it is a psychological time frame, and
it ~lso helps to focus our attention upon the projected author figure, who is
always at the center of the work of art. Thus, since the writer destroys the time
system and the values of the ordinary, average, mundane life from which he
stands apart, he must reconstruct a new universe for himself, and he does so
by his patterning. He imposes patterns found outside the experience itself,
upon the experience. In this way the modernist writer moves toward a fusion
of the different art forms, a characteristic quality of the movement.
This thumbnail sketch of the aesthetic principles employed by Muir's
contemporaries provides a standard for Muir's poems, and it is the basis for
my belief that Muir is a modernist writer in the same sense that Joyce and
Woolf and Eliot and the late Yeats are modernists. For example, almost all of
Muir's verses make use of personal experiences, a term which covers a great
deal in reference to Muir. Just as James Joyce increases the range of human
activities that the novelist may treat in fiction, and Virginia Woolf adds to
that range with her explorations of the human psyche, so Edwin Muir brings
new subjects to his verse-writing. He considers his religiousand psychological
experiences and, most important, his intuitive ideas, to be on a level with
actual, physical experiences. Quite often he uses these personal experiences
directly: the "I" of his poems is not a shallow mask or persona, but the poet
himself as he indeed existed. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this practice
resembles that of Henry Vaughan and William Wordsworth, and Muir is
clearly following in their footsteps. Now such a practice seemsto contradict
the idea of the poet using mythic patterns, and it is certainly unlike Joyce's
distancing of his own experiences when he holds Stephen Dedalus
accountable for them. But there is no contradiction in Muir's case, for by the
time he came to write his late poems, he had learned to recognize the
universal, the archetypal, the mythic element, in his own daily experiences.
Literally he did stand with "one foot in Eden," the land of myth and fable,
while the other foot remained in the reality of ordinary life of the twentieth
century. By way offurther illustration, here are a few verses of "The Wayside
Station."
Here at the wayside station, as many a morning,
I watch the smoke torn from the fumy engine
Crawling across the field in serpent sorrow.
Flat in the east, held down by stolid clouds,
The struggling day is born and shines already
On its warm hearth far off. . . . . . . . . .

. .. ... ... The wood stands waiting

While the bright snare slips coil by coil around it,
Dark silver on every branch. The lonely stream
That rode through darkness leaps the gap of light,
Its voice grown loud, and starts its winding journey
Through the day and time and war and history.
The speaker here does not need to employ esoteric myths and beliefs, for he
has learned to recognize the archetypal in its everpresent form. In Muir's
practice, the mythic element which we find in all modernist writers reaches its
most natural and convincing expression.
The reason why Muir was twenty years late injumping on the modernist
bandwagon has to do with some of the differences between his life and the
lives of his better-known contemporaries. I have already pointed to his
humble birth and the circumstances of his early life. In contrast, the
highpriests of modernism came from a social class which insured them a good
education and the precocious development of their talents. Modernism may
in fact be an exponential factor of the socio-economic conditions brought
about by the material prosperity of late nineteenth-century Britain. Certainly
the economic resources and cultural advantages of John Joyce, born into the
Irish landed gentry, and of Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine
and intellectual spokesman for his generation, had a significant role in
making James Joyce and Virginia Woolf the leaders of this movement. We
could even set up a scale which would show that the most outrageous
developments in technique came from the writers most highly placed on the
social ladder; and that as the eminence of a writer's birth diminishes, so the
experimental quality of his writing decreases. Such a scale accounts for the
Sitwells,children of the aristocracy, owners of coal mines, being at the top in
terms of experimentation, and D. H. Lawrence, son of the wage-earning coal
miner, being very close to the bottom-content, of course, is a very different
matter. Obviously then a writer with Muir's social origins could not be
expected to experiment in language techniques, while his modernism could be
anticipated to differ consideably from that of Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and others
coming from similarly privileged and advantaged classes.
Another significant point is that Muir was in his late twenties when he
began seriously to write and that he brought a fully formed, mature outlook
to his work. Many writers, because of their social advantages, write as they
develop, and the critic can trace their growth in their works. Such a
development is not present in Muir's verses. This hard-working young man
never had the time to step back from his life experience and to transform it
into a Voyage Out or a Scottish Dubliners. Indeed by the time he was in a
position to write for his own self-expression (as opposed to his money-earning
journalism), he had so suppressed the pain of his earlier life that it required

great effort even to bring it into hisconsciousness. Too, the personal humility
that was so much a part of his character prevented his ever considering his
outer life to embody, even in an ironic way, a paradigm of the artist's life.
Thus when we look for a place for Edwin Muir in the academic
pigeonholes, it must be in the area reserved for his contemporaries, the
accepted modernists--but his niche will have to have some label to distinguish
him. His actual literary contribution was to bring certain traditional qualities
to the new art form of his time, and, by using the new modes of modernism, to
give them a contemporary interpretation. Specifically this tradition is that of
the Platonic, archetypal view of life which we find in Wordsworth's
"Intimations Ode," and in the works of the seventeenth-century religious
poets--Vaughan, Traherne, and Herbert. With one qualification, the basic
ideas of Edwin Muir's poems parallel the thought of their poems. This
qualification has to do with Muir's religious attitudes. The earlier poets were
Christians nurtured in the Catholic tradition who found their poetic
expression in the language and images of that tradition. Edwin Muir was cut
off from the Catholic inheritance by the Protestantism of his homeland and
was further isolated by his self-conscious acceptance of twentieth-century
agnosticism.
Although his ideas were essentiallyreligious, he could not turn directly to
traditional religious language and imagery. Instead he employed the quasiscientific knowledge which his age put in the place of religion: that of
psychology, and particularly the psychological teachings of Jung. Edwin
rarely commented on this aspect of his verse, while Willa, especially after
Edwin's death, denied in a,mostemphatic manner that he owed any debts to
Jung. The strength of their denial is in itself suggestive, but the answer lies in
the poems, for Jung's theories-that fusion of traditional religion, philosophy,
and theosophy-most aptly describe what we find in Muir's poems. There is
not time to take up the interesting question of why Muir did not assume a
religous stance in his verse, as of course T.S. Eliot did in his post-1927poems.
Again, the answer lies in national attitudes to religion and in social and
economic influences.
Edwin Muir is actually more than a modernist. Rather he is a link
between his contemporaries and older, traditional poets. His work comes
after that of Joyce and Woolf and Eliot, and it brings modernism into the
ongoing tradition ofIiterature. When Edwin examined new poems and novels
in his critical essays, he always asked what use could be made by other writers
of the techniques or innovations under discussion. He insisted that, in
addition to its intrinsic merit, a work of art makes a useful contribution to the
genre or mode of expression. Fittingly then, his own poetic contributions
bring modernism, a type of writing which seemed to have reached a dead-end,
back into the main stream of British literature.