IN 1951 Dr Edwin Muir, the prominent Scottish poet, novelist and critic, gave a speech at Newbattle Abbey College, where he was warden.
The two things which distinguished Scottish from English poetry, he said, were that it was mainly a poetry of the people, not of a class, and that its great figure was Burns. One of its chief themes was liberty, he continued. The first striking poem in Scots had been John Barbour’s The Brus, which described incidents in the Scottish War of Independence; it had been followed after an interval by Blind Harry’s narrative poem about Wallace.
Dr Muir had been appointed warden in 1950, and served in the post for five years. The photographs were taken at the college a few months before the speech.
He had been born in Orkney, in 1887. His family had moved to the mainland in 1901after his father lost his farm. But his parents and his two brothers died in quick succession, and he had little option but to take on a number of menial jobs.
But despite such an uncongenial milieu, his obituary in the Glasgow Herald observed in January 1959, “he read widely, made a thorough study of Nietzsche, became a convert to Socialism, and took his first step in journalism writing for the ‘New Age’, then under the editorship of A.R.Orage”.
He met and married Willa Anderson in 1919. After a spell in London the couple went abroad, living in Prague, Dresden and Salzburg, amongst other cities. They collaborated on translations of the works of notable German-language authors, and later introduced the books of Franz Kafka to the English-speaking world.
Dr Muir published his first collection of poetry in 1925. Six other volumes would follow. “Although largely written in traditional metres, Muir’s poetry displays a Modernist fascination with dream, myth, and fable”, says a note on the Edinburgh University resource pages on Scottish literature. “In his later poems, generally regarded as his finest, he confronts the Second World War, totalitarianism, and the threat of nuclear holocaust”.
His criticism, too, was collected in several volumes. He was, the note adds, “regarded by many of his contemporaries, notably T.S. Eliot, as the most discerning critic of his day”. In 1955-56 he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He returned to Britain and lived in Cambridge.
In an appreciation printed with the Herald obituary, Norman MacCaig summarised Dr Muir’s distinguished and wide-ranging career, and concluded: “The poetry, however, is the main thing. Dr Muir’s death will be a great loss to the very large number of his friends. But the poems remain to remind us of a man it was impossible not to love and respect, and who was, it seems to be, the best poet writing in English that Scotland has so far produced.”
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