SOURCE: DiPiero, W. S. “On Edwin Muir.” Chicago Review 37, no. 1 (winter 1990): 80-8.

In the following essay, DiPiero reflects on Muir's contributions to poetry and concludes that Muir's poetry embodies a struggle against what Muir called “the cry of historical necessity over the life of the individual.” The author calls Muir a religious poet whose language eschews “sacred decoration,” and whose works are informed by “a sense of decency” and “human goodness and kindness.”

Reviewing the Collected Poems in 1955, Edwin Muir criticized Wallace Stevens for following too obediently aesthetic patterns contrived by his own mind, and for allowing his speculative nature to turn him away from life “to an imaginary world of beautiful objects, of peaches and pears.” Stevens's desired world, while it may be occupied with things that satisfy the senses, remains a place which Muir calls “a legendary world without a legend.” What he means, I think...