SOURCE: McCulloch, Margery Palmer. “The Single, Disunited World: Edwin Muir and Prague.” In Scotland and the Slavs: Selected Papers from the Glasgow-90 East-West Forum, edited by Peter Henry, Jim MacDonald, and Halina Moss, pp. 131-40. Nottingham, England: Astra Press, 1993.

In the following essay, McCulloch analyzes how Muir's experience in Prague, translating Kafka, and working with Czech refugees influenced his religious and political views and his development as a poet.

The city of Prague intersected with Edwin Muir's life and work at two distinct periods in his development as writer and with a gap of over twenty years between them. In 1921 Prague was the first European city the Muirs visited when Edwin's contract with the American Freeman magazine gave him the money and leisure to travel abroad, but when he had not yet seriously begun to write poetry. In 1945 he returned to post-war Prague as Director of the British...