In "The Impact of Translation" (
The Government of the Tongue
, 1988) Seamus Heaney argues that Muir, "the poet who translated Kafka in the 1920s and who witnessed the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia after the war [was] the one poet from the British island with an eschatological. if somewhat somnambulistic address to the historical moment in postwar Europe." Heaney had, himself, imitated Eastern European parabolists (like Zbigniew Herbert) in
The Haw Lantern
(1987). However, the attempt to package Muir as an Eastern European poet in translation seems little more plausible than the attempt to package MacDiarmid as a postmodernist. Both arguments dress disabilities as deliberate art. The hiatus in Muir's sense of Scotland, ''One foot in Eden" and the other nowhere, empties his poetry of local habitation. Nor do most of Muir's allegorical beasts contain enough actual blood for existential terror. MacNeice, whose poetry was more concretely in touch with the postwar, as with the pre-war, moment, says in
Varieties of Parable
(a set of lectures given shortly before his death in 1963): "[Muir's] metaphysico-mystical writing is so unadulterated either by topical or documentary elements or by primarily aesthetic ones, such as images used for their own sake, that I find reading many of his poems on end is like walking through a gallery of abstract paintings."
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Nonetheless, "the possible conditions for a literary revival" in Scotland made waves around the archipelago. For instance, R. S. Thomas declared his enthusiasm, especially for MacDiarmid, in "Some Contemporary Scottish Writing" (1946). Yet although he shared MacDiarmid's anglophobia and contempt for fellow Celts "whose sole criterion of success is appointment to some post under the English Government," Thomas noted: "The poet's chief problem is, how in virtue of his mind and vision can he best save his countrydirectly through political action, or indirectly through his creative work?" Later, in fact, growing "rather tired of the themes about nationalism and the decay of the rural structure in Wales," Thomas was to separate his political activism from his poetry.
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John Hewitt, in Northern Ireland, faced still more testing questions. A friend of Muir's, he was a poet, socialist, and atheist from a Protestant (Methodist) family. On cultural as well as political grounds Hewitt opposed a Unionist establishment that had its own reasons for promoting the kind of Anglicization so resented by Scottish and Welsh Nationalist literati. However, he also disliked what he saw as the atavis-
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