Lonely Traveler

"A 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."

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."

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."

"My 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.

Attempting to leave Czechoslovakia, the poet had to submit to a rigorous inspection by the Communists: "They came to look over all my books and notes but only the first in charge could read English. He sat down with my wife and myself for tea and apologized for causing us inconvenience. We had much literary taste in common and we discussed poetry."

Something from all of the lands and people he has known appears in his poetry--"not obviously, but in many ways"--Muir explains. His poetic understanding and traditional simplicity were recognized three years ago when Queen Elizabeth named him Commander of the British Empire. Muir's works have not yet achieved wide fame in this country, however. Perhaps tomorrow's lecture will further American understanding and appreciation of this lonely traveler:

"From far I come, And pass from place to place In a sleep wandering pace To seek my home."