Word: muir
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Characteristically, Muir may confine his current tour of the New World to Cambridge alone. "There is no reason to try to cover Chicago and Hollywood," he explains. "If I come to know this city, I will have done enough for one time...
...pilgrim from place to place rather than a wanderer"; thus fellow-poet Stephen Spender once described Edwin Muir, the University's Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer for 1955. One of England's leading contemporary poets, Muir last month made his first visit to America. Tomorrow in New Lecture Hall he will deliver his initial lecture on "The Estate of Poetry...
This combination of traveling and staying put is just one of the paradoxes of Muir's life, which has seen the boy who quit school at the age of 14 eventually become a distinguished professor. Thinking back to his early years, Muir recalls: "I disliked school from the start... with its smell of ink, chalk, slate, corduroy, and varnish. The classroom made me feel as if my head were stuffed with hot cotton-wool...
...education came through osmosis," the poet remarks. Indeed, his writing still reflects the atmosphere of his childhood home on the Orkney Islands off Scotland, where "there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous." Leaving this peaceful habitat, Muir moved first to the Scottish mainland and then, in 1919, to London. Yet he still had not found either his art or his happiness. It was only after several months of psychotherapy, he recalls, that his "vague fears were quite gone...
...Muir continued his travels, searching for a place to settle down and "habituate myself to the rhythm of life." It was not until he was 35 that he felt "a spring released in my life" and he first began to write poetry. Now he looks back with pleasant reminiscence on the years as a clerk in a bones-to-charcoal factory, as British consul in Prague, as headmaster of a workingmen's school, and as head of a British education program in Czechoslovakia...