Deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations.

His childhood in remote and unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic Eden to Muir, while his family's move to the city corresponded in his mind to a deeply disturbing encounter with the "fallen" world. The emotional tensions of that dichotomy shaped much of his work.

Edwin Muir was born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887.  Today, he is identified as one of the central figures of the modern Scottish literary Renaissance, both for his poetry and for his book Scott and Scotland (1936)He spent his early years on of his father`s farm, `The Bu`.  A stent with poverty forced the family to move to Glasgow in 1901. The move from the peaceful setting of Orkney to industrialised Glasgow was extremely traumatic for Muir.  He later described it as a descent from the innocence of a rural Eden into Hell.  Because of hardships, within a few years of their arrival, two of his brothers and both his parents were dead. The remaining siblings chose to go their separate ways and Muir found himself adrift in a large city with little education or prospects.  In 1916 he began contributing poetry to a magazine called New Age under the pseudonym `Edward Moore`, and his first book, a volume of short pithy essays on society, politics and the arts, entitled We Moderns, was published in 1918.