In his Autobiography (1954), the Scottish poet Edwin Muir expressed bitterness at the late start he got on poetry. “I was thirty-five … and passing through a stage which, if things had been different, I should have reached ten years earlier. I began to write poetry at thirty-five instead of at twenty-five or twenty.” In fact, his First Poems was published in 1925, when Muir was thirty-eight. It had been preceded by a ten-year spell of odd jobs, unsettled opinions (Nietzsche, socialism), and unhappy love affairs. He had already produced a volume of aphoristic essays, We Moderns (1918), which show Muir under the spell of Nietzsche and which he later disowned. In 1922, on a visit to Dresden with his wife, Muir had a kind of revelation: “I must live over again the years which I had lived wrongly … everyone should live his life twice, for the first attempt is always blind.” The theme of repetition or return thus became increasingly important to Muir, who found in ancient myths a source of meaning that echoed and reechoed in contemporary life.

In his Introduction to Muir’s Selected Poems (1966), T. S. Eliot stressed the thematic unity of Muir’s ouevre. “I do not believe technique was ever a primary concern of Edwin’s,” wrote Eliot. “He was first and foremost deeply concerned with what he had to say.” As Muir wrote in his Autobiography, “the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of