Visionaries and Revisionaries: Late Muir and MacDiarmid

• Published in: Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959 pp. 169 - 197
• Main Author: Palmer McCulloch, Margery
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 15.05.2009
• Subjects: Anthologies; Anthropology; Armed conflict; Art genres and movements; Art history; Arts; Behavioral sciences; British literature; British studies; Edwin Muir; Ethnography; Ethnology; European studies; Greek myth; Hugh MacDiarmid; Imagist poetry; Information resources; Information science; liminal positioning; Literary criticism; Literary genres; Literary studies; Literary Studies (20th Century onwards); Literary Studies (British and Irish); Literary Theory and Cultural Studies; Literature; Military science; modern world; modernism; Modernist art; modernist orientation; Modernist poetry; Poetic movements; Poetic themes; Poetry; Political science; Religious poetry; War; War theaters; World wars
• ISBN: 0748634746; 9780748634743
• DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748634743.003.0009

A poetry in which the disorder and irrelevanciesOf the real world are seenAs evidence of the order, relevance, and authorityOf the law behind, so that whatIs misleading (private or untidy) becomesBy its very irrelevance significant of a realityBeyond the bewilderment of external reality.Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Kind of Poetry I Want’ (1943)Edwin Muir and Late ModernismIn 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).