SOURCE: Richman, Robert. “Edwin Muir's Journey.” The New Criterion 15, no. 8 (April 1997): 26-33.

In the following essay, Richman explores the theme of mythic journeys that pervade Muir's poetry and laments the loss of “a sense of communal past” that appears to preclude popularity for poetry that, like Muir's, addresses “great themes” rather than focus on the personal.

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...