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“... Sweet Shop, Rottenrow (1961). I’d seen the picture once before, many years ago, at the poet Edwin Morgan’s flat in Anniesland. He bequeathed it to Glasgow University, which is how it came to be in the Hunterian. The children in the painting are on the move, limbs going, hair flying, and the shop sign is painted over earlier signs that show through in ...”

“... best serving poet in Egypt’), Alun Lewis (‘the best of the Welsh war poets’), Edwin Muir (‘the best of the Scots poets’). Alan Ross, by the way, is lauded as ‘the supreme recorder of the convoys’. This is literary history done over as pubchatter, almost cynically superficial. In Fitzrovia, they would have loved ...”

“... need now is to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the ...”

“... I have taken most of the translations in this piece, renders the word as ‘hopeless’. Willa and Edwin Muir have ‘dismal and cheerless’, J.A. Underwood has ‘bleak’. I also rather like ‘desolate’ myself, but all of these words point in the right direction. Trostlos can also be used of a dreary landscape, and in this sense calls up another ...”

“... audience with a message intended to do credit to Burns and Scotland. In 1936 the poet and critic Edwin Muir regretfully acknowledged the historical process that meant a poor man’s poet was now the property of the upper classes. ‘Holy Willie, after being the poet’s butt, has now become the keeper of his memory.’ By no means Holy Willie, but a ...”

“... was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at an age when most of his ...”

“... and weightlessness (‘a pillar of radiant house-dust’). Collective and put-upon (the rather Edwin Muir-ish ‘From the Canton of Expectation’, where even the – for once lower-case – line beginnings seem to look glum):When our rebel anthem played the meeting shutwe turned for home and the usual harassmentby militiamen on overtime at ...”

“... ever set it. Nowhere is it more difficult to observe than in the matter of Robert Burns. Long ago, Edwin Muir said that ‘for a Scotsman to see Burns simply as a poet is almost impossible.’ Robert Crawford, himself an admired and graceful poet, writes on the closing page of The Bard that ‘Burns’s poetry carries so much of its maker with it that it ...”

“... our migrations ‘exile’ (a chapter-heading in George Marshall’s lucid and thorough study of Edwin Muir’s native culture), although the individual choice is usually our own. As Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters, ‘I do not know if I desire to live there, but let me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing out, “Oh why left I my ...”

“... areas of Scotland in the first half of the 17th century.’ Calvinism, they imply (against Edwin Muir, Fionn MacColla and many other of our writers), did not entail a snuffing out of joy and beauty. No doubt its effects were as mixed as those of, say, Islam today: but it is a fact that around 1700 in Edinburgh, under a Calvinist religious and ...”

“... found notorious in the country.We made a trip into Glasgow to a care home on the Crow Road, where Edwin Morgan was then living and writing. He and I had corresponded when he left his old flat and lost his library. I sent him some books and we agreed to see each other in Glasgow. Eddie was a city man. He was a city poet. It must have been odd for him to have ...”

“... Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known, post-Apocalypse poem ‘The Horses’ and Austin Clarke’s much less familiar ‘Forget me not’, a poem written out of Clarke’s angry response to the Irish trade in horse meat in the 1950s. Although generously receptive to ...”

“... Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. But the effect by the mid-20th century was clear enough. Edwin Muir, writing in 1935, saw a country ‘gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate character’. ‘All the best people have left’ was a sentiment still heard in the 1950s: I remember ...”

“... of the kind there was to be for Scott. It was Burns who gave his guinea to the cause of Thomas Muir at the same time as the young Scott was rehearsing solo cavalry charges on the sands of the Firth of Forth, with more conscientiousness than his companions thought decent. Muir, a revolutionary, added a detested novelty to ...”

“... reviewer had no difficulty in categorising I Crossed the Minch with other books of the time (by Edwin Muir and Neil Gunn) that treat Scotland and its islands in hard, socio-economic terms. MacNeice knew that the Hebrides – unlike Synge’s Aran Islands – had been much written about by inhabitants who were novelists and poets. On Barra he visited ...”