Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
A Poet in Exile
By W.S. Merwin
Collected Poems
by Edwin Muir
Oxford, 310 pp., $6.00
Except for one additional poem, 'The Two Sisters,' this collected edition of Edwin Muir's poems is substantially a republication of the volume of the same title which appeared in 1960, the year following his death. Muir was a year-and-a-half older than T. S. Eliot (who was his publisher, and who provided a Preface to this edition) and his particular exile was probably more crucial and certainly more dramatic than Eliot's. He was born on a farm in the Orkneys and his family stayed in those islands until he was fifteen. As a child, he was inevitably made aware of the household's increasing economic difficulties as his father was forced to poorer and poorer farms by the exactions of landlords; and he saw his elder brothers leave home and the life on the land for the mainland and jobs in Glasgow. But these facts were not the part of his early years that later seemed most real to him, and eventually provided a setting for much of his poetry. Instead it was the Orkney landscape itself, the farming and fishing life as he had seen them as a child, that came to figure in his imagination as a symbol of a timeless state an image of Eden. His estrangement from that world was to him an enactment of the Fall: one of the recognizable steps in what he called 'the fable.' In his autobiography he has described what he meant by the term:
Review, 3162 words
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