SOURCE: "The Politics of Edwin Muir's Autobiographies," in Prose Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, September, 1985, pp. 97-117.

In the following essay, Lodge reconsiders prevailing views of Muir's political development as suggested by his autobiographical writings through an examination of his contributions to the New Age during the 1920s.

On publication, Edwin Muir's The Story and the Fable¹ was hailed as "a book of outstanding delicacy and integrity."² Michael Hamburger described An Autobiography as a "singularly honest and lucid account,"³ while Rex Warner almost ran out of adjectives in gushing that these writings should be labelled "gentle and wise, modest, vivid and illuminating."⁴ Alfred Kazin referred to Muir as "a giver of testimony"; and Stephen Spender, with a note of meekly resigned puzzlement, commented that "it is difficult to criticise a work which gives a single-minded impression of integrity."⁵ No less an authority than T. S. Eliot sought to stress Muir's...