SOURCE: Friar, Kimon. “The Circular Route.” Poetry 84 (April 1954): 27-32.

In the following review of Muir's Collected Poems, Friar provides an overview of the major themes of Muir's poetry: the tension between time and eternity, the horror of the first and second world wars as symbols of “life at its most material and unreal,” and life-long the journey from childhood to old age and death.

Although at the age of sixty-seven Edwin Muir is one of the best poets writing in English today, we in America have known his work only by scattered pieces, for not a single volume of his poetry has ever been published here before. We have known him hitherto by an autobiography of singular charm, The Story and the Fable, and of course by the works of Franz Kafka which he and his wife have so admirably translated. His early childhood was spent in the...