SOURCE: Frisardi, Andrew. “The Anomaly of Edwin Muir.” The Hudson Review 52, no. 4 (winter 2000): 576-85.

In the following essay, Frisardi suggests that unlike the work of Muir's more explicitly political contemporaries, his poetry reimagines history as an internal event, which it depicts economically and with compelling imagery. Frisardi draws upon poems such as “The Usurpers” and “The Clouds” as examples.

Muir [was] concerned with imagination not only in order that there may be good poetry, but in order that man himself may survive.

—Thomas Merton

Octavio Paz has pointed out that the evolution of art is not as linear as modern art history makes it seem. Unlike science, which progresses incrementally and (in theory at least) never returns to its past limitations, art often advances by reviving obsolete styles and values. Such unprogressiveness implies a broader definition of contemporaneity than our own time often allows; postmodernism tends to be...