Edwin Muir made his mark as a poet, critic, novelist, journalist, translator, and a writer of evocative autobiography. His reputation grew slowly but steadily. In the 1920s and 1930s he was known mainly as a critic, particularly of the novel, and as the translator who introduced Franz Kafka to the English-reading public. Meanwhile as a poet he was mastering his medium with such effect that during the 1940s his poems began to reach an ever-increasing audience. By the 1950s critics of note were commenting that he was among the few major poets of the century and that a proper appreciation must rest on his whole canon for its singular poetic statement about man in the twentieth century.

Born on Pomona, one of the Orkney Islands of Scotland, Muir, the youngest of six children of James Muir, a small tenant farmer, and Elizabeth Cormack Muir, grew up in an...