SOURCE: Daiches, David. “Types of Vision: Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid.” In God and the Poets, pp. 176-90. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

In the following excerpt from a longer chapter in an academic study, Daiches considers the ways in which Muir's poetry and autobiographical works communicate “his shifting visions of human fate through the exploration and adaptation of history and myth and personal feeling.” Particular attention is paid to Christian theology and Greek myth, along with Muir's use of personae, in “The Return,” “Adam's Fall,” “One Foot in Eden,” and “The Transfiguration.”

Edwin Muir was buried on a cold, raw January day in 1959 in the churchyard at Swaffham Prior, the Cambridgeshire village where he spent the last two-and-three-quarter years of his life. After the funeral his widow Willa said to me: ‘Edwin believed that the soul was immortal. I don't. No gentle ghost will visit...