"Between the Tiger's Paws": Scotland, Czechoslovakia, And the Poetry of Edwin Muir (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the course of the past three decades, the poetry of Edwin Muir (1887-1959) has fallen into deep neglect, especially on this side of the Atlantic. Even during his lifetime Muir was better known as a critic and translator--he and his wife, Willa, were responsible for introducing the novels of Kafka and Hermann Broch to the English-language world--than he was as a poet. The achievements of a poet writing in the plain style, as Muir for the most part did, were easily overlooked amid the pyrotechnics of T.S. Eliot and the other high modernists. It is thus something of a surprise to discover, reading Lyndall Gordon's biography of Eliot, that by the mid-1950s Eliot himself had come to view Muir as the finest poet then working in Britain. (1) Muir never regarded the modernists as his rivals. For him originality meant not novel techniques or subject matter but getting down to spiritual bedrock--meant, as Eliot has it in "East Coker," "the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again." (2) Muir's search for what he calls in his Autobiography the "fable," the pattern of eternity as it inflects our experience, has been a source of perplexity for readers of postmodern inclination, insofar as they arecognizant of Muir at all. These tend to be the same people who regard Yeats's concern with Indic philosophy or Eliot's Christianity as damaging to their poetry. It comes down to a suspicion of the striving for religious transcandence and a vehement rejection of any claim to have attained it. In the best of Muir's work the fable and what he refers to as the "story," the particulars of our lives in nature and society, are held in tension, as they are, for example, in his poem "In Love for Long" (1946), a paean to the mystery of a love