SOURCE: McCulloch, Margery Palmer. “Edwin Muir, Calvinism and Greek Myth.” In Edwin Muir: Centenary Assessments, edited by C. J. M. MacLachlan and D. S. Robb, pp. 75-86. Aberdeen, Scotland: Association for Scottish Studies, 1990.

In the following essay, McCulloch,explores the relevance of Muir's strict Calvinist upbringing to his poetry and examines his use of Christian and Greek myth.

One of the recurrent aspects of Edwin Muir's work which puzzled me when I first began to read his poetry was his recourse to Greek myth as vehicle for his themes. Why should a writer who had spent the formative years of his childhood in the cultural ambience of the Norse-influenced Orkney Isles turn for subject matter to the stories of classical Greece in preference to the sagas and legends of the northern world—a course which the younger Orkney writer George Mackay Brown was later to follow? Why not...