Description

Oliver & Boyd, Published 1966. Hardcover, viii, 314 pp.; 23 cm; First Edition. In Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Blue cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine and gilt publisher's device at spine foot. Light bumping to edges and corners, mild shelf and edge wear. Binding tight. Creasing to top corner of endpapers and title page. Tape residue on front and rear free endpapers, and a brief pen note keyed to page numbers on verso of rear free endpaper. First eight pages of text carry light marginal rules, some underlining in pen, and one question mark in the margin; all other pages unmarked. Cream dust jacket illustrated with a blue abstract design, priced 42s, shows several small nicks and tears, creasing along edges, toning to top and bottom edges, and mild overall shelf wear with light soiling and spotting. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. First full-length biography of the Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959), published seven years after his death. Butter wrote with the cooperation of the poet's widow, Willa Muir, who gave him access to all relevant papers in her possession and to much of Muir's correspondence, and he drew on the reminiscences of many who had known him. Quotes extensively from Muir's own letters, including correspondence with T. S. Eliot (Muir's publisher at Faber) used by permission of Mrs T. S. Eliot, and traces the mental and spiritual development behind the poetry from the Orkney childhood through Glasgow, Nietzsche, the Kafka translations, St Andrews, Prague and Newbattle. Butter went on to edit the Selected Letters of Edwin Muir (1974) and The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir (1991), making this study the foundation of his Muir scholarship. Number 7 in Oliver & Boyd's Biography and Criticism series, general editors A. Norman Jeffares and R. L. C. Lorimer. Contents: Orkney; Glasgow; Early Writing and Nietzsche; Marriage; Latitudes and Early Poems; England and France; Poetry 1932-1937; St Andrews 1935-1939; The Translator; The War Years; Poetry 1938-1945; Prague and Rome; Newbattle; The Reviewer; Last Years; Bibliography; Index.