Edwin Muir and Late Modernism

In an article in the Listener in 1958 Edwin Muir referred to Scotland as his ‘second country’, and this ‘half-a-Scot’ perspective characterised his attitude to things Scottish throughout his life. He similarly distanced himself from orthodox Christianity, claiming a belief in the immortality of the soul but rejecting the doctrines of any of the religious institutions, seeing himself as ‘a sort of illicit Christian, a gate-crasher’. As we have seen in earlier chapters, such liminal positioning is relevant also to his relationship as poet with modernism, especially if modernism is interpreted narrowly as an aesthetic movement focused primarily on formal experimentation in the arts. Muir was never this kind of formal innovator. T. S. Eliot commented that he did not believe ‘that technique was ever a primary concern with Edwin. He was first and foremost deeply concerned with what he had to say’; while Muir himself acknowledged that he did not feel comfortable with the word ‘technique’, writing to the poet and translator Michael Hamburger in 1952 that ‘it always gives me a slightly bewildered feeling; if I can translate it as skill I am more at home with it, for skill is always a quality of the thing that is being said or done’ (SL, p. 161).