ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot, patting Edwin Muir and Scotland on the head, said Muir was among the poets Scotland should always be proud of. A moral man, as Scots are apt to be, Muir was also a Christian Socialist who appealed to a world outside history. Though Muir's "seven years Eden" ended in boyhood, his "holy" Celtic forebears, one a priest, stayed with him. "Ambiguous" doesn't mean murky, for Muir it means that his vision is believable, also a chimera, not one or the other but both at once. Muir's kind of seeing doesn't ascend to conceptual truth, and the thing seen isn't strained of impurities. Muir thought otherwise, hoping to recover the long-vanished audience that had the Border Ballads on the tip of its tongue. John Buchan, a Scot who overlapped him in time, gives Muir's likeness. In his autobiography, Buchan says of himself that he was born "with the same temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century".
