Though the translations of Kafka he did with his wife, Willa Muir, have long given Edwin Muir a secure place in modern literature, his reputation as a modern British poet of the first rank came only late in his life. While Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, responding to French symbolism, established Anglo-American modernism as the dominant mode of poetry in English, Muir took another road. Starting with ballads and seminal events of his early childhood and nourishing his imagination on such German writers as Hölderlin, Rilke, and Kafka, Muir achieved a poetry that was visionary, generously moral, romantically lyrical, personal but not private.

Muir's earliest years were literally outlandish. He was born on a farm on Mainland, Orkney, due west of the southern tip of Norway. When he was two his family moved to the Orkney island of Wyre, two miles long and a mile wide, where...