[In the following essay, DiPiero reflects on Muir's contributions to poetry and concludes that Muir's poetry embodies a struggle against what Muir called “the cry of historical necessity over the life of the individual.” The author calls Muir a religious poet whose language eschews “sacred decoration,” and whose works are informed by “a sense of decency” and “human goodness and kindness.”]

Reviewing the Collected Poems in 1955, Edwin Muir criticized Wallace Stevens for following too obediently aesthetic patterns contrived by his own mind, and for allowing his speculative nature to turn him away from life “to an imaginary world of beautiful objects, of peaches and pears.” Stevens's desired world, while it may be occupied with things that satisfy the senses, remains a place which Muir calls “a legendary world without a legend.” What he means, I think, is that Stevens's imagination, though much at ease among the fabulous, lacked the grounding and precedence of fable, that he could speculate on techniques of the mythy mind but did not exercise such a mind. Frost was the more appealing poet to Muir, because he wrote about human action and choice as if they were already legend; he even singled out, in a 1943 review of Frost's work, the crashing buck that emerges at the end of “The Most of It” as “a fine legendary image.” Muir's critical judgments, like most of his poems, were rooted in his early experience. He was born and raised in the islands of Orkney, and in his Autobiography he writes about the ordinary blend of the fabulous and the normal in his native place: islanders sometimes encountered “fairicks” dancing on the shore in moonlight; a man who sailed out to find a mermaid returned to tell of his conversation with her; feats of great strength were reported and remembered as among the Achaeans; Muir's own father told him of witches he knew.

Those were facts absorbed by the young boy who would later speak of childhood as the only period in life when we live in immortality because we are without a sense of the policing exactions of time. He describes childhood as a perfect unselfconscious repetition, “one day endlessly rising and falling.” The ordinary activities of farm life fused in his young imagination to the heroic stories he heard from islanders and those he read in the few books available to him. When cows were brought to the bull he and the other children were shut inside the house, but to him the voices he heard in the yard were the cries of warriors fighting or playing heroic games. His poetry was a remaking or recapitulation of essential fables. His early life gave him not only subject matter but also legendary patterns on which he modelled narrative forms. In one of his late essays he remarked that “we become human by repetition.” Poetry becomes more humane and more responsive to the whole of our existence by virtue of its recapitulations: “In the imagination that repetition becomes an object of delighted contemplation with all that is good and evil in it, so that we can almost understand the saying that Hector died and Troy fell that they might turn into song.”

Muir's people were tenant farmers subject to the determinations of their landlords. When Muir was fourteen his family had already worked three farms; the last of them was the worst, with dreary damp quarters and miserable land. That was when they decided to emigrate to Glasgow. Later he would recall life in Orkney as “a good order.” That order, already destabilized by the tough existence on their last farm, was shattered when they moved to the city. Within two years his parents and two brothers were dead. The city did not destroy the family, though the circumstances of urban life did wear away the health of Muir's father. But the removal, the dislocation, took the family out of the familiar religious and social formations which sustained and to some degree protected them physically and spiritually. Muir soon commenced a succession of menial office jobs that allowed him to make his way in the world. One was in a bone factory in Fairport where for two years he breathed the charnel stench of furnaces that reduced to charcoal carloads of maggot-covered bones. Orkney may have been a hardscrabble place, but there the elements of life, fabulous and actual, were fused into sensible rhythms, and the ancient order of guilt and sacrifice attached to the slaughtering of animals was still intact. Working in a bone factory, Muir was living through one kind of fall from a known, felt unity. The story of the fall is often retold in his poetry, along with the dream of ritual purification and the restoration of a whole order. His adult intellectual life, in fact, can be mapped as a series of attempted restorations or, as I think of them, conversions, where the soul seeks to heal lesions, to mend its divisiveness. The Autobiography concludes with this:

I was lucky to spend my first fourteen years in Orkney; I was unlucky to live afterwards in Glasgow as a Displaced Person … Because a perambulating revivalist preacher came to Kirkwall when I was a boy, I underwent an equivocal religious conversion there; because I read Blatchford in Glasgow, I repeated the experience in another form, and found myself a Socialist. In my late twenties I came, by chance, under the influence of Nietzsche. In my middle thirties I became aware of immortality, and realized that it gave me a truer knowledge of myself and my neighbors. Years later … I discovered that I had been a Christian without knowing it.

The becalmed, processional summation of his experience has the measured quality of much of his poetry—it's the plainness and orderly simplicity of fable.

By the time he began to write poetry at the age of thirty-five, after having launched himself as a critic and essayist, Muir was by his own report too old to be vulnerable to contemporary influences. He came to poetry an already formed intellectual, and he admitted that his deference toward ideas made his beginnings as a poet quite difficult. That deference never left him, and a distinguishing feature of his poems is that they are concept heavy. He could never quite express in poetry what it feels like to work a thought, and the mixed feeling-tones kneaded into moments of consciousness are so withheld or muted or singularized in his poetry that they hardly seem to exist. His image world is more a bearer of ideas than of feelings. He felt that the task of the poet is “to make his imaginative world clear to himself … [but] that world in becoming clear may grow hard and shallow and obscure the mystery which it once embodied.” Muir wanted to write a poetry that embodied the essential mysteries of existence and civilization. The danger of shallowness becomes all the greater when a poet's imaginative world exists, like Muir's, as a succession of emblematic settings, events, and personages stilled and heraldic like a frieze. He kept his world clear not by enlarging or diversifying his image hoard but by refining its essential concepts and by varying the fabulous contexts poem to poem. He is like the bard who tells the same story three ways, each time with a different shape and import but always recognizably the same.

In the Autobiography he writes that “there are times in every man's life when he seems to become for a little while a part of the fable, and to be recapitulating some legendary drama which, as it has recurred a countless number of times, is ageless.” His poems are such ritual enactments, and they do not concern themselves only with recapitulated human actions. Seasons exist for him as legends. In an early poem, “When the Trees Grow Bare On the High Hills,” feeling the surprising buoyancy and weightlessness of things in autumn the poet becomes “Mere memory, mere fume / Of my own strife, my loud wave-crested clamor, / An echo caught / From the mid-sea / On a still mountain-side.” The transformation of self into memory is some kind of purification ritual wherein finally “Attainment breathes itself out, / Perfect and cold.” Muir seems to have believed the poet to be a permeable consciousness suffused at once by the instant and by the completed past—any poem then becomes a ritual offering of that consciousness, purified of personality. The haunted tone so peculiar to Muir's work comes from the way any moment in a poem can swim away in the echo chamber of the past's endless repetitions. His poems do not much show the stress of deliberations, the kind of agonies and grieving scruples that grind inside so much of Eliot's poetry; they present recapitulated suffering as if it were an unchanged moral sentence. In one of his finest poems, “Ballad of Hector in Hades,” the Trojan hero is doomed to recall Achilles' pursuit and the chase around the walls of the city. (The poem recapitulates a childhood experience when Muir was chased home from school by a local bully.) Hector remembers, for himself and us, the bright beauty of the physical world, “The little flowers, the tiny mounds, / The grasses frail and fine.” He remembers, too, how the bright world converges on his shame and all of nature bears witness to his flight: “The sky with all its clustered eyes / Grows still with watching me, / The flowers, the mounds, the flaunting weeds / Wheel slowly round to see.” His own death is now legend in his consciousness, and the singular feeling tone is relief that his humiliation is over, though the image that concludes the poem is the one we know must repeat in Hector's mind: “While round bright Troy Achilles whirls / A corpse with streaming hair.”

The fall of Troy is one of the recurrent legends in Muir's poetry. Its destruction and the dispersal of its inhabitants represented for him the wartime devastations and displaced populations of the 1930s and 1940s. Legends survive in large part because they are essentially static, unchanging, always somewhat aloof from the rattlings and travails of daily life. They lie beyond fact. Muir's enterprise was to disclose the legendary within familiar facts. In “Troy” an old man “so venerable / He might have been Priam's self, but Priam was dead,” lives among Troy's sewers, fighting off the rats that have overtaken the city. Looters come and torture him; among the rats and ruins they interrogate him, “Asking: ‘Where is the treasure?’ till he died.” In another poem, “A Trojan Slave,” we see the idea-trace even more darkly drawn. Thirty years after the fall of his city, the old slave regards his master as “a Grecian dolt, / Pragmatic, race-proud as a pampered colt.” For all his hatred of the Greeks, a “cold aspiring race,” his deeper spite is reserved for the Trojans who, even as their city fell, refused to arm their servants: “And while they feared the Greeks they feared us most.” The war, as the slave reviews it, was a system of fatal vanities built up on class and racial arrogance. The disintegration of class distinctions and racial divisiveness was one of the aspirations of the Socialism that Muir embraced in his early twenties (though he detested the Marxist view of necessary class war), and we hear that in the slave's view of what could have saved Troy. But there is also in the slave's presentation the sourness and anger of Nietzschean ressentiment, that source of power and righteousness for the disenfranchised which, Nietzsche argued, was at the center of the rise of Judeo-Christian morality. For the slave, the fall of the great city remains, “as if in spite, a happy memory.”

His 1924 collection of essays Latitudes contains a piece titled “A Note on the Scottish Ballads” in which he says that Scottish writers usually come from humble ranks whereas English writers most often come from the cultivated classes. Though he had no university education, Muir became an extremely cultivated man, a much sought after translator and reviewer, but these structures were built on the bedrock of Orkney culture. The plainness of his poems, I mean not just the unadorned diction but also the preservation of event and figure as primeval foreground, speaks for an ambition he saw realized in the ballads: “The ballads go immediately to that point beyond which it is impossible to go, and touch the very bounds of passion and of life.” But Muir was too much an ironist, and became too much a European intellectual, to touch those extremities in his work. His poems are filled with elemental settings and actions which do not of their own possess elemental feelings. Poems like “The Town Betrayed,” “The Return of Odysseus,” “The Interrogation,” “Outside Eden,” and the beautiful “The Transfiguration” and many others, are pageant presentations of life in its extremest, least guarded intensities; they present the “passion, terror, instinct, action” that he found and cherished in ballad literature, but they don't seethe with the experience of those intensities. The textures of the actual have not been brought over into the language textures. This has something to do with the meditative quality of Muir's work. In the ballads he praises the absence of meditation, “this ecstatic living in passion at the moment of its expression and not on reflection, and the experiencing of it therefore purely, as unmixed joy, as complete terror.” We sometimes most admire what we know lies beyond our own temperamental capacities or which we feel is unrecoverable. Muir admired in the ballads the kind of complete, oblivious inhabiting of momentary feeling, of elemental joy, fear, or sorrow, which his own poetry does not enact, cannot enact because it is so mediated by reflection. His poems powerfully illustrate, exemplify, and report sudden passion, they do not embody it. Scenic clarity and the high relief of anecdote matter more to him than emotional intensity, and his favorite imaginative arrangement was of figures in a landscape.

The series of poems he wrote in the early 1940s with titles like “The Threefold Place,” “The Original Place,” “The Unattained Place,” and so forth, are mostly about imaginary homecomings and original places. Home, stranger, man and woman, “leaf and bird and leaf,” threshold, city walls, messengers, “silver roads,” these are the figures and landmarks in the poems. They have the simplicity Muir valued in the ballads, but they are presented with a self-awareness not found there. “The Sufficient Place” is a legend about what suffices, the moment in consciousness when balance and peace obtain in a household while “All outside / From end to end of the world is tumult.” The household, the man and woman standing at the threshold “simple and clear / As a child's first images,” are set forth as mythic categories: “This is the Pattern, these the Archetypes.” That intellectual theatricalization, the self-conscious designation of the vision, marks a reflective estrangement that the poems themselves time and again seek to overcome. In the most unsettling of this group, “The Dreamt-of Place,” Muir dreams he sees two birds cutting across the air like Dante's two mating doves, Paolo and Francesca, leading the souls lost to love. But this is a place untroubled by orthodox judgment, free from damnation. The old god does not rule here: “The nightmare god was gone / Who roofed their pain.” Hell greens out and becomes a natural continuation of il dolce mondo aboveground. The dead and the living reconcile into one continuity:

This is the day after the Last Day,
The lost world lies dreaming within its coils,
Grass grows upon the surly sides of Hell,
Time has caught time and holds it fast for ever.

First world, last world, dream world are all one in the poem, and they comprise the kind of visionary tableau Muir was finest at creating. His clearest signature, however, comes with the turn in the last few lines. Within his dream-vision of the place of redemption, of unity and harmony, comes a thought: “Where is the knife, the butcher, / The victim? Are they all here in their places? / Hid in this harmony? But there was no answer.” The mind and heart can put the question to the dream, but the dream—legendary, heraldic, typical—is unresponsive, sealed off, keeping its own mysterious wisdom. Muir's imagination never strayed far from Eden's gate, from the sedate perfections of the Golden Age, but this inclination was jolted and countered by the experience of his own disordered nightmarish time. What dream of a golden place can keep down bloodguilt, paranoia, and the knowledge of genocide? This poem is one of his finest because it tells with massiveness and credibility and completeness the simple story of a dream persuasion overturned by waking doubt, waking knowledge. But that suspicion comes to us at such a vulnerable moment, when we have already been converted by the authority of the imagination of the dream, that we are then drawn even closer to some final derangement.

When he writes of refugee populations, outcasts of Paradise, homeland, town or family (the images in Ingmar Bergman's Shame could have been modelled on Muir's poetry) he often inducts himself among “the always homeless, / Nattionless and nameless.” His “we” is an autobiographical fact; after leaving Orkney he spoke of himself as a Displaced Person. It is also a moral and political commitment to suffer history among others, to negotiate moral qualities in a world where Nietzsche's project of the transvaluation of all values seemed to have gotten stuck terrifyingly halfway, half-realized, a monstrous intellectual creature whose handsome but unfinished leonine and raptor features were blent into beautiful but not fully articulated human ones. In “The Good Town,” once all the normal balances of moral relation are disrupted by two wars and their ensuing occupations, all those clarities are made opaque by the new mediators—policemen informants, collaborators. The change causes the teller of the tale, a townsman, to question what they all (perhaps too complacently) regarded as the essential goodness of their place and which now seems to have been “conquered” by evil. He realized, though, that moral balance is not governed like fluid levels: you cannot readjust it by increasing or decreasing quantities, or by controlling local pressures and gravities. The bad, in order to succeed, may take on the color of the prevailing good. The good, intact but enslaved, may take on the hue of the wicked in order to pass unnoticed, unpunished: “We have seen / Good men made evil wrangling with the evil, / Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.” The poem, for all its cool archetypal presentation, describes actual historical patterns lived out by populations in occupied territories (and even more exactly by the experiences of partisan cadres throughout Europe in the 1940s). It all tells us how the failure of the will to question and refine the moral-political values we hold most dear, and most (pridefully) representative, will weaken those same values and induce a complacency that breeds corruption and equivocation. The populace described in “The Good Town” have become moral refugees; they live in their natural place as displaced souls.

Muir somewhere says that Eden's gate is everywhere and nowhere. That also describes the center of a labyrinth, as well as the disorientation induced by night crossings, border flights, interrogations, displacements without destinations. In “The Labyrinth” Theseus, or Thesean consciousness, has finally escaped the maze, which was a condition of pure alienation, perfect of its kind with a center everywhere and all else undifferentiated “place.” Once restored to “its enemy / The lovely world,” Theseus suffers the maze in memory, in his ordinary experiences of “all the roads / That run through the noisy world, deceiving streets / That meet and part and meet, and rooms that open / Into each other.” He has a dream vision that momentarily dissolves the labyrinth's afterimage which so confuses his life, a vision of a world overseen by gods, “each sitting on top of his mountain-isle.” The round of human events, the repetitions of birthdays, marriages, holidays, of “Ploughing and harvesting and life and death,” exist within the harmonies made by the gods' conversation. Everything is woven into harmonious celestial dialogue. It's a vision of the Peaceable Kingdom as a perfect sentence. And that, now, is the real world to Theseus, though it exists only as one vision in the image-hoard that also includes the recurrent dream of the maze that concludes the poem. That repeated dream knocks the dreamer back into his alienated life; whenever it recurs he wakes to feel momentarily lost: “Oh these deceits are strong almost as life. / Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth, / And woke far on. I did not know the place.”

Muir's entire career can be viewed as a struggle against what he described in a 1949 essay on Spengler as the cry of historical necessity over the life of the individual. He was converted to Socialism in his twenties, but he could not accept Marxism, which he felt makes the historical process “the sole significant embodiment of human life.” He believed that while humankind works out its destiny in time, in history, its meaning in the world and to itself derives from the soul's immortality. Muir knew that the artistic mind shares this view with the religious mind. The view has a pragmatic virtue in that “it gives meaning to the actual life we live, and accounts to us for ourselves.” Out of this comes his concept of the imagination, stated late in life in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures (published as The Estate of Poetry), as “that power by which we apprehend living beings and living creatures in their individuality, as they live and move, and not as ideas or categories.” As a definition grounded in elemental sympathy, it is winning but too nice. Muir's poetics finally are circumscribed by a sense of decency, of human goodness and sympathy, which verges sometimes on advocacy and which in the rhythms and language of his verse is transmuted into sober, diligent, modest normalcy. While he removes the human from the mechanical press of history, he refits the individual into a legendary narrative which itself tends to be overdetermining. Muir is certainly a religious poet by his own definition, but he is one who in the language of his poems abjures sacred decoration; and although we hear tell of aspiration and grief and joy in his poetry, we are seldom brought close to the incoherent cravings and indecencies of appetite and need, or the shriek of want and sorrow. His ambition to pursue our originating fables in the ordinary experience of the modern individual, and to conduct the pursuit in an almost puritanically plain style, equipped him to retell what he called “the great and the little glooms.”