He was was natural inside the domestic in Deerness, Orkney Islands in the remote northeast of Scotland. Around 1901, when he was Fourteen, his father misplaced a domestic & a personal moved to Glasgow. Inside Glasgow number one his father, so his 2 brothers, so his mother died in the space of two or three years. His life as the young human within Glasgow was the depressing case for him, involving a succession of unpleasant jobs. Within 1919 he married Willa Anderson (they would late collaborate in English translations of such writers when Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch) and moved to London. From either 1921 - 1923 he was in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to England in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956 Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected fallowing his dying & published within 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From either 1927 to 1932 he published three novels & within 1935 he came to St. Andrews where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (published in 1936). From either 1946-1949 he was Director of the British Council in Prague and Rome. 1950 saw his appointment as Warder of Newbattle Abbey College (college for working class men) near Edinburgh and in 1955 he was made Norton Prof of English at Harvard University. He returned to England around 1956 but died in 1959 at Swaffam Priory, Cambridge and was buried nigh Cambridge.

His childhood around remote & unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic "Eden" to Muir, while his personal's move to a city corresponded within his mind to the deeply distressing encounter using the "fallen" globe. A emotional tensions of that duality shaped good deal of his function & deeply influenced his life. His psychological distress led him to undergo Jungian analysis in London. a vision where he found the Creation strengthened the Edenic myth inside his mind, leading him to underst& his life as an human and his career as a poet as a working-away from archetypal fable. Around his Autobiography he wrote, "the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man"; my deeds olympic games be "a myth which we act almost without knowing it." Alienation, paradox, a experiential duo of effective & evil, life & dying, love & hatred, & images of journeying, labyrinths, instance & stores fill his function.

His Scott & Scotland advanced the claim that Scotland might simply produce a national literature by writing inside English; an opinion which located him inside directly opposition to the Lallans movement of Hugh MacDiarmid. He experienced little sympathy for Scottish nationalism. Remembered for his deeply felt & intense poetry around evidently, unpretending language by using couple of stylistic preoccupations, Muir occurs as comparatively little known however important modern poet. Within 1965 a volume of his selected poetry was edited and introduced by T. S. Eliot. An first-class essay discussing Muir's literary career (Edwin Muir’s Journey, by Robert Richman) is available in the online archives of The New Criterion. Numerous of Edwin & Willa Muir's translations of German novels come however inside print.

A as a consequence quotation expresses a basic experiential quandary of Edwin Muir's life: "I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from either Diary 1937-39.)