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“... Edwin Muir at Leuchars Junction I think of Edwin Muir in the darkness before dawn at Leuchars Junction commuting to the Food Office in Dundee. Where had he lost his way, the track of vision lost in chaos as Glasgow swallowed once the track of childhood? A precarious order collapsed like those houses in St Andrews bombed last night; Kafka, from an interpreter of divine meanings become a writer of fictions, allegories of invention ...”

“... I was born before the Industrial Revolution,’ Edwin Muir wrote in The Story and the Fable (1940),and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow ...”

“... innovation; the grain of the language is often a smoother, less arresting version of that of Edwin Muir or George Herbert. It’s hard to believe most of these poems were written in the last quarter-century. One distinguished contemporary poet scowled when I told him I was reading Jennings’s Collected Poems: ‘Life’s too short.’ As I ...”

“... El Greco’s Toledo, shining over water, A Scoto-Spanish, kirky Tir nan Og, While Willa and Edwin Muir, in Willa’s mum’s Draper’s shop, talk sex, conscious that past Their douce seaside cosmology of golf balls Where fiddlers jig and ‘The Democratic Butcher’ Places his doggerel in the local rag, Immigrants flit – black ...”

“... the ‘Josephine’ story tells us) there is no such thing as art. The republication of Willa and Edwin Muir’s Kafka translations recalls that it was they who made Kafka’s name famous and his texts accessible in the English-speaking world, albeit in a translation which was unduly coloured by their own interpretation of his writings. A more recent ...”

“... Priestley made his English Journey. A few years later Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, and Edwin Muir Scottish Journey. Now, as the succeeding wave reaches the bottom of its downward swing, the BBC send out Bainbridge to follow Priestley, and James Campbell records travels which were in the spirit, if not the footsteps of ...”

“... reminded, in the end, not of Eliot, but of the less remarkable, though still impressive, figure of Edwin Muir, as in ‘Place’: So we live nowhere, but somewhere there is a place Where life is lived, a kingdom of the blest, Perhaps, in which the programmes are ...”

“... music and the dance of words were the whole meaning.’ Though the poetry of his fellow Orcadian Edwin Muir baffled him, he heard in it a beguiling ‘secret and exact music’. Brown learned much from musical masters such as Tennyson, Hopkins, Eliot and Dylan Thomas, although at his best he could cut free from them and write with a plain clarity: A ...”

“... same kind of simplicity – the kind that’s related to a total honesty and integrity – that Edwin Muir had. This, of course, has nothing to do with shutting your eyes to this and that and being a kind of holy fool. Neither was to be taken in by elegant hypocrisies and well-dressed pretensions. And each had confusions and complexities that made them ...”

“... wonder, of the Orkneyman and author of one of the great poets’ prose books (An Autobiography) Edwin Muir, who, come to think of it, also thought about existence in terms of a labyrinth. Tranströmer is neither anxious nor imposing in his poems. There is never the pushiness of ‘Me first, Kingsley, I’m cleverest.’ He never became resentable to ...”

“... been not-quite-obviously-Scottish-enough; he had the cheek to live somewhere else. Andrew Young, Edwin Muir, and several others, have been treated to petty discriminations of a similar kind.’ I suspect that Dunn himself is among those ‘several others’. Graham, it seems, was a drunk; and not a convivial drunk, but sour and contumacious. And he was ...”

“... climate still linguistically fissured in the wake of the quarrel between Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir; he was also painfully aware of the difficulties of writing for a Scottish Gaelic audience numbering at best 65,000, most of whom would have little interest in experimental contemporary poetry or prose. The title of one of his English poems asks ...”

“... of ‘a newspaper-seller standing in the gutter’, a ‘pale rain-flawed phantom of the place’. Edwin Muir, in his autobiography, is riding on the Glasgow tram when he suddenly notices the passengers’ eyes moving in their heads like the eyes of animals. (He was always falling from the Edenic Orkney of his childhood.) Crawford brings us word of Hugh ...”

“... by repetition and work; there is no secret hinge the world swings on the way there is in Edwin Muir, a poet whose name has come up recently in Heaney’s essays. The lines – for once not ploughlines, not lines of verse – have their meaning, just as the sphere or circle of The Haw Lantern did. The meaning is not as intricate, or as deeply ...”

“... literary experience’ are resuscitating a native Modernism (shakily embodied by early Auden and Edwin Muir). The strangeness secreted within British traditions has been re-invigorated by the East European example, he thinks, and now permeates texts such as Christopher Reid’s Katerina Brac (or, one might add, his own Audenesque reports ‘From the ...”