Mastodawn

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” https://library.hrmtc.com/2026/03/10/dont-bend-dont-water-it-down-dont-try-to-make-it-logical-dont-edit-your-own-soul-according-to-the-fashion-rather-follow-your-most-intense-obsessions-merciles/ #accordingTo #anneRice #bend #book #edit #EdwinMuir #falselyAttributed #fashion #follow #FranzKafka #logical #make #mercilessly #mostIntense #obsessions #quote #rather #soul #try #waterItDown #WillaMuir

Assoc for Scottish Literature Feb 17

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,
On the bare field – I wonder, why, just now,
They seemed terrible, so wild and strange,
Like magic power on the stony grange…

—Edwin Muir (1887–1959), “Horses” 🐴
published in THE GOLDEN TREASURY OF SCOTTISH VERSE, @canongatebooks 2021

https://canongate.co.uk/books/3267-the-golden-treasury-of-scottish-verse/

#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #YearoftheHorse #LunarNewYear #ChineseNewYear #poem #poetry #horse #horses #Orkney

Assoc for Scottish Literature Dec 18

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky…

—Edwin Muir, “Scotland’s Winter”
from ONE FOOT IN EDEN (Faber, 1956)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #winter

Assoc for Scottish Literature Sep 23

You that through all the dying summer
Came every morning to our breakfast table,
A lonely bachelor mummer,
And fed on the marmalade
So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able
To prise you from the sweet pit you had made…

—Edwin Muir, “The Late Wasp”
from One Foot in Eden (Faber, 1956)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #autumn

Assoc for Scottish Literature Sep 23

Leave, leave your well-loved nest,
Late swallow, and fly away.
Here is no rest
For hollowing heart and wearying wing…

—Edwin Muir, “The Late Swallow”
first published in One Foot in Eden (Faber, 1956)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/late-swallow/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #autumn

Assoc for Scottish Literature Aug 31, 2025

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…

—Edwin Muir, “To the Old Gods”
📷 Ballachulish Figure, c728–524 BCE

https://www.nms.ac.uk/discover-catalogue/a-mysterious-iron-age-figure-from-ballachulish

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #archaeology #IronAge #EdwinMuir

In the Dark Jul 24, 2025

The Confirmation – Edwin Muir

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world seem bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

by Edwin Muir (1887-1959)

#EdwinMuir #TheConfirmation

Edwin Muir - Wikipedia

Assoc for Scottish Literature Jun 5, 2025

In favoured summers
These islands have the sun all to themselves
And light a toy to play with, weeks on end…

—Edwin Muir, “The Northern Islands”
published in The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, ed. Peter H. Butter (ASLS, 1999)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Orkney #summer #EdwinMuir

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Assoc for Scottish Literature May 15, 2025

“What is remarkable is that Muir did not become a social realist, like W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, and other related British poets during the 1930s, who didn’t know anything close to what Muir knew directly about urban poverty”

—Andrew Frisardi on the life & work of Edwin Muir

@litstudies

9/8

https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-51/the-good-life-of-edwin-muir/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney #modernism

The Good Life of Edwin Muir

In Muir’s political poetry, history is reimagined as an internal event. Muir depicted our time as one of transition, an interregnum of civilization, during which the danger is great that we can forget altogether the meanings and associations that make specifically human life possible.

Sacred Web

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Assoc for Scottish Literature May 15, 2025

“[Edwin Muir’s] travels in the 1920s immediately after the end of World War One, and again at the end of World War Two, tell a story of Europe itself at critical points in its history.”

—Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch, on the Oxford University Press blog

8/8

https://blog.oup.com/2017/05/edwin-muir-story-europe/

#Scottish #literature #history #Europe #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney

Edwin Muir and a story of Europe

While reading recently British Library correspondence files relating to the poet Edwin Muir—the 130th anniversary of whose birth will be on 15 May this year—I was struck, as I have often been, by the important part played in his development as man and poet by his contact with the life of Europe—a continent that is currently high on the agenda of many of us with a possible British Brexit in view.

OUPblog