Muir [was] concerned with imagination not only in order that there may be good poetry, but in order that man himself may survive.

—Thomas Merton

Octavio Paz has pointed out that the evolution of art is not as linear as modern art history makes it seem. Unlike science, which progresses incrementally and (in theory at least) never returns to its past limitations, art often advances by reviving obsolete styles and values. Such unprogressiveness implies a broader definition of contemporaneity than our own time often allows; postmodernism tends to be provincial in its idea of what makes art relevant to contemporary life. For many, it seems, art is supposed to be an indiscriminate mirroring of what surrounds us: commercialism, built-in obsolescence, and journalistic sound bites—reinforced by an often unspoken, to say nothing of unexamined, nihilism.

In such a climate it isn't surprising that a poet like Edwin Muir has faded from view. Not that he is completely forgotten in this country: Graywolf Press has kept his marvelous autobiography in print and, in 1992, reissued Muir's lectures on the relationship between poetry and society (The Estate of Poetry, introduced by John Haines). His collected poems, however, have not been issued in the United States since 1965. (The Complete Poems, edited and annotated by Peter Butter, was published in Scotland in 1991.) I first heard of Muir from an essay by Kathleen Raine in her collection Defending Ancient Springs (Lindisfarne Press, 1985, now out of print). And not since the early sixties, when writers such as Merton, Allen Tate, and Hayden Carruth were paying serious attention to Muir, has his poetry been discussed much or appreciated in U.S. journals. One reason for the lack of interest in Muir's poetry is its traditional, English and ballad-influenced prosody, which kept it obscure for many years even in Muir's own time. Its occasionally old-fashioned diction and inversions, and its sometimes stiffly iambic meter (Muir himself admitted that, having started writing poetry at thirty-five, he was painfully slow at developing a supple style) can be off-putting to any sensibility braced by Pound, Eliot, and their successors.

Muir's lack of technical innovativeness, however, isn't the only, or even the greatest difference between him and the creators of modernism. Everyone who knows Muir's work knows that he grew up as the son of a peasant farmer in the Orkneys, in one of the last communities in Europe practically untouched by Renaissance and Enlightenment culture—and that his poetry and prose are greatly affected, one might even say determined by the struggle Muir underwent when circumstances landed him in the middle of several modern industrial and political horrors. Like Eliot, Muir believed that contemporaneity requires a relation to the past, but the past to which Muir related his contemporary experience was not literary so much as ancestral and organic—“culture” for Muir meant everything from animal husbandry to Dante and Milton. He could afford to be less anxious about the relation of individual talent to tradition precisely because his tradition, while including elements of high culture, was more primary than the latter: it was based on the fundamental relationships between human beings living together in interdependent community with nature. Muir depicts his native community in his Autobiography (1954):

I cannot say how much my idea of a good life was influenced by my early upbringing, but it seems to me that its sins were mere sins of the flesh, which are excusable, and not sins of the spirit. The farmers did not know ambition and the petty torments of ambition; they did not realize what competition was. … [T]hey helped one another with their work when help was required. … [T]hey had a culture made up of legend, folk-song, and the poetry and prose of the Bible; they had customs with which they sanctioned their instinctive feelings for the earth; their life was an order, and a good order.

This background explains why, while most other modern writers were, in Pound's words, writing from a fragmented stream, Muir was still vitally related to the lost world of social and cultural unity. When Muir wrote lines such as “But still from Eden springs the root / As clean as on the starting day,” he was expressing a sentiment many writers believed or felt but few could assert with real conviction. Thus it came about that Muir was one of those poets, rare in any age, whose vocation it was to bear witness to a vision of radical innocence and the fate of it in the world. This, it seems to me, is another source of Muir's neglect in recent years: the postmodern aesthetic is too cynical, indecisive, and shackled by irony to take Muir seriously.

And yet the unusualness of Muir's poetry is surely one of the features that attracts its admirers—of which, no doubt, there are still many. His value is not in what he has to offer technically, or in his reflecting back to us our existential fears and fragmented identities; the special gift of Muir's poetry is that it reminds us of the possibility of a rooted life—“rooted” in all senses: geographical, ancestral, cultural, natural, spiritual. Muir was consistent in his romantic contempt for the modern idea of progress; he warned that, in a culture overdetermined by technological development, outward changes happen so fast that our primal identity becomes “indistinct. … [T]he imagination cannot pierce to it as easily as it once could.” The constant metamorphosis of outer life brought about by technology obscures the essentials of human experience, which are remarkably consistent over time. In an essay called “The Poetic Imagination,” published in Essays on Literature and Society (1949), Muir made a distinction between technological and human progress:

Applied science shows us a world of consistent, mechanical progress. Machines give birth to ever new generations of machines, and the new machines are always better and more efficient than the old, and begin where the old left off. … But in the world of human beings all is different. … Every human being has to begin at the beginning, as his forebears did, with the same difficulties and pleasures, the same temptations, the same problem of good and evil, the same inclination to ask what life means.

Despite the measured tone of this passage, which Muir wrote in his late fifties, his actual, early confrontation with industrialized society was personally calamitous. From his teenage years, when his family was economically forced to move to Glasgow (four of them, including Muir's parents, died within the next few years), into his mid-thirties, Muir earned a living at various menial jobs, experiencing preunionized labor and modern urban poverty firsthand. One clerical job, for example, forced him to live in a town entirely dominated by the company for which he worked, a factory that burned the bones of slaughtered animals to use the ashes for making glue. Muir describes the freight cars full of bones “festooned with maggots,” and the rank stench of rotting flesh from which it was impossible to escape anywhere in town. It's not surprising that Muir turned during this period to Nietzsche and socialism, the former, as he realized afterward, providing him with a rationalized fantasy of power in the face of overwhelming, impotent despair; and that the aphorisms he wrote at his desk at work were bitter and ironic, unlike anything he was to write later.

What is remarkable is that Muir did not become a social realist, as did Auden, Day-Lewis, Spender, and other related British poets during the thirties, most of whom didn't know anything close to what Muir knew about poverty. Instead, he applied his native gift for mythological thinking—i.e., for discerning large, symbolic patterns of meaning in life—to integrating his childhood and his adult experiences:

“THE COVENANT”

The covenant of god and animal,
The frieze of fabulous creatures winged and crowned,
And in the midst the woman and the man—
Lost long ago in fields beyond the Fall—
Keep faith in sleep-walled night and there are found
On our long journey back where we began.
Then the heraldic crest of nature lost
Shines out again until the weariless wave
Roofs with its sliding horror all that realm.
What jealousy, what rage could overwhelm
The golden lion and lamb and vault a grave
For innocence, innocence past defence or cost?

Again and again, Muir's poems, as here, address the traditional dichotomy of innocence and innocence lost, often using Bible stories, especially Eden and the Fall, to communicate the sense of a chasm between living in unity with others and with God and nature, and living in isolation, dislocation, and dis-ease. Once he had regained the psychological vantage point of his childhood experience—after having a breakdown in London, subsequent Jungian analysis, and finally leaving Britain with his wife, Willa—he referred to it in his poetry, usually metaphorically, as the ground or touchstone or prototype-of-wholeness against which he measured contemporary disturbance, flux, and change.

An interesting essay could be written about the animals in Muir's poetry; farmer's son that he was, he rarely depicts them in a Rousseauistic wild state, but rather, in terms of humankind's dependence on them. Muir's most widely anthologized poem, “The Horses” (which Eliot referred to as a “great poem of the nuclear age”), treats this theme, and the related one of alienation and reconciliation between human beings and nature, with a masterfully paced narrative and vivid, tangible detail. To appreciate the poem fully, one must recall that Muir wrote it in the 1950s, the coldest period of the Cold War. He sets up the poem in the first few lines with the contrast between unity and division that will structure the whole piece.

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.

The narrative continues:

By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

Note how the last line above captures in just a few words the irony that social isolation has increased despite modern civilization's enhanced means of communication. And the first inkling of reconciliation with the animals is depicted later in this poem with lovely simplicity and strength:

Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road.
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

The horses are “strange,” it turns out, simply because we estranged ourselves from them. The poem itself makes clear they are not wild: “We had sold our horses in our fathers' time / To buy new tractors.” And the following excerpt from a letter Muir wrote in July 1958 further clarifies that he wished to emphasize the relationship between the human and the natural world. The horses are “good plough-horses and still have a memory of the world before the war. I try to suggest they are looking for their old human companionship.” Yet the speakers of the poem, a collective “we” (a common device in Muir's poetry), respond to the horses' return with fear of their instinctual energy, presumably because the machines with which they replaced them, the “dank sea-monsters” now “moldering away … like other loam,” did not require them to exercise their capacity for relating to living things. The speakers of the poem, then, don't trust the horses' return.

                                                            Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.

With remarkable economy, this passage concretizes the idea of reconciliation—it finds an objective correlative for it. Thus, Muir can conclude the poem with a specific image of renewal:

Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

This deep acceptance of our inextricable closeness to animals and nature, always coupled with a passion for human culture and intellect, is one of the aspects of Muir that makes his work so clear-sighted and sound. Unlike many mystics—and Muir certainly made no attempt to disguise his metaphysical passions—he didn't succumb to the extremism that would insist that all art should be metaphysical. In his critical writings, he was as likely to extol Austen, Thackeray, and Rabelais, as Hölderlin, and he disliked Valéry for being too remote from everyday life. Muir's equanimity and balance made it possible for him to appreciate a very wide range of styles and views; his 1926 volume of critical studies, Transition, is remarkable for its insightful and jargon-free characterizations of Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and others. This tolerance for aesthetic and philosophical views markedly different from his own, along with his uncanny knack for illuminating generalization, are the qualities that made Muir one of the best critics of his time, and the most independent from the methods of the New Criticism that Muir never liked, believing it reinforced (because it overintellectualized its subject) the already widening gap between writer and audience. Muir resembled the mature Yeats in his allegiance to and faith in physical, temporal life, although (also like Yeats) his poetry shares many features in common with the symbolist aesthetic that has appealed so much to modern poets prone to philosophical idealism—expressive concentration, interpenetration of idea and image, and spareness of quotidian detail. Muir's truest voice is a blend of earthy homeliness and visionary idealism; his is a romanticism of the second half of life. A key to Muir's Christianity, in fact, was his admiration for the doctrine of Incarnation; he blamed John Knox, the Calvinist, for betraying that teaching and thereby keeping the Renaissance, with all its secular revelations, out of Scotland: “The Word made flesh here is made flesh again, / A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook” (“The Incarnate One”).

For Muir, culture is the zone in which mind and nature, the timeless and the temporal meet and are reconciled. This is why he didn't agree with Auden and other modernists who claimed that poetry is “useless.” Useless, yes, if by that we mean utilitarian; but incomparably useful when we remember that without art—without gratuitous beauty—a society can have no living dialogue with its own depths and heights. Muir believed that one of the tasks of art was to renew the ligatures that keep these connections current and vital, and that civilization itself cannot survive without such renewal.

His own unique brand of political poem—and he wrote some of the most notable of the early Cold War years—was based on these notions. “The Usurpers” is one of several poems Muir wrote about his experience of postwar Prague, where he was director of the British Council Institute from 1945 to 1948. A Czech writer, a friend of the Muirs, had shown them a photograph of some young Gestapo men, one of whom had interrogated, tortured, and murdered her husband. She showed the Muirs her husband's shirt, covered with blood and torn scraps of flesh, mailed to her by the Gestapo after her husband's death. Muir wrote of the men he saw in the photograph:

They all seemed to be in their late twenties, and it suddenly came into my mind that they had been bred by the first world war. … [Our friend] pointed at one young man and said without expression: that is the one who strangled my husband. But it might have been any of the others. They stared out from the photograph with the confidence of the worthless who find power left in their hands like a tip hastily dropped by a frightened world.

Muir's poem about the photograph is a first-person dramatization of the sort of mentality he ascribes to Regan, Goneril, and Edmund in his essay on King Lear (published the same year, 1949, as the collection in which “The Usurpers” appeared), that mentality which sees “things in a continuous present divested of all associations, denuded of memory and the depth which memory gives to life, … claim[ing] a liberty which is proper to nature but not to society.” “The Usurpers” depicts how shockingly casual the speakers are about dismissing centuries of accumulated knowledge:

There is no answer. We do here what we will
And there is no answer. This our liberty
No one has known before, nor could have borne,
For it is rooted in this deepening silence
That is our work and has become our kingdom.
If there were an answer, how could we be free?
It was not hard to still the ancestral voices:
A careless thought, less than a thought could do it.

This perspective, invaluable to the empirical methods of pure and applied science (which are based on systematic suppression of subjectivity), devastates human life, which thrives on imagination, stories, and values that can be felt or intuited but not measured. The Gestapo men, like the power-obsessed characters in King Lear, boast of a

                                                                                                                        liberty
No one has known before, nor could have borne,
For it is rooted in this deepening silence
That is our work and has become our kingdom.

Dissociated from a culture that conveys a sense of meaning and relatedness, the speakers mistakenly believe that this alienation constitutes genuine liberty: “We dare do all we think, / Since there's no one to check us, here or elsewhere.” And the end of the poem implies that the speakers' naturalistic bias leads, ironically, to a cold objectification of nature.

It is a lie that they are witnesses,
That the mountains judge us, brooks tell tales about us.
We have thought sometimes the rocks looked strangely on us,
Have fancied that the waves were angry with us,
Heard dark runes murmuring in the autumn wind,
Muttering and murmuring like old toothless women
That prophesied against us in ancient tongues.
These are imaginations. We are free.

The last line is especially telling: “freedom,” in this sense, requires the contemptuous dismissal by reason of all so-called superstitions of the past. Another of Muir's poems, “The Cloud,” satirizes political systems based on this rationalistic mindset. It was written during Muir's last year in Prague, shortly after the Soviet takeover. The Communists, although their “impersonality was … not as … cruel … as the Nazis,” were able to impose their system only by carefully censoring all spontaneity of personal relationship and feeling—a ploy Muir experienced firsthand when two government officials attended and took notes on his lectures at the university. For Muir, the Communists, like the Nazis, “called up a vast image of impersonal power, the fearful shape of our modern inhumanity.”

Their categories, the working class, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the communists, the anti-communists, were far more real to them than … human beings. Their moral judgments were judgments of their categories. … They could understand a good worker, but a good human being was an abstraction which fell outside their sphere of thought.

One day Muir and his wife were driving to a writers' retreat at Dobris Castle near Prague, when they rounded a corner and saw in a field “A young man harrowing, hidden in dust; he seemed / A prisoner walking in a moving cloud / Made by himself for his own purposes.” Muir, of course, knew nothing of this man's actual political convictions. The lines are a satirical description of the “worker” that Communist ideology supposedly defended. Muir is applying the anti-imaginative constructs of Communism to one of its own, to show how it failed to provide the liberation of spirit it promised.

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.
The bushes by the roadside were encrusted
With a hard sheath of dust.
We looked and wondered; the dry cloud moved on
With its interior image.
                                                                                                    Presently we found
A road that brought us to the Writers' House,
And there a preacher from Urania
(Sad land where hope each day is killed by hope)
Praised the good dust, man's ultimate salvation.

A social order that deprives human activity of its sacramental dimension, in other words, is dead. Communist ideology, Muir suggests, condemned the very person it claimed to free; it limited him to an identity entirely circumscribed by “the biological sequence,” so that he could imagine himself only as “a blindfold mask on a pillar of dust.”

Both “The Usurpers” and “The Cloud” are typical of the sort of political poetry Muir wrote: the subjects are universalized; the images and ideas, with few exceptions, could apply as easily to any place or time with similar circumstances. Muir almost always looked for the essentials behind and beneath surface conditions; his poems remind us that politics, societies, and history are “fables” as well as literal “stories.” (The early version of Muir's autobiography was called The Story and the Fable because he wanted to tell not only his life's events, but their context in the larger picture of things—would that more contemporary memoirs would follow suit!) In Muir's political poetry, history is reimagined as an internal event. I don't mean to imply that this is the way political poetry, or poetry in general “should” be written—although I do believe that the greatness of poetry is measured by it. Muir himself, as I explained above, was very far from being dogmatic about his approach. My point is that Muir's very rare gift for grasping the deeper significance of twentieth-century events and mentalities—and for depicting them with economy, profound imagery, and, especially in his last two books, literary art—is ignored to our detriment. Muir depicted our time as one of transition, an interregnum of civilization, during which the danger is great that we can forget altogether the meanings and associations that make human life possible. His personal struggle to assimilate (for he never really adapted to it) this hypertechnological century resulted in some of the most singular writing of our time, immensely useful to those of us who, even if we have never known any other world, are trying to understand, articulate, and address what is wrong with modern life. Surely, to move forward we can't afford to be sentimental or overly nostalgic about what we've lost; but it is equally true that forgetting it limits us to our own myopia. Muir's poetry and critical writings are there to help us remember.