SOURCE: Hoffman, Daniel. “The Story and the Fable.” In Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves, and Muir, pp. 225-56. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

In the following essay from an academic book on myth in modern poetry, Hoffman draws upon Muir's autobiographical and critical writings to uncover the significance of myth in Muir's early and later poetry. Particular attention is given to “The Ballad of the Flood,” “Scotland, 1941,” and “The Combat.”

In the last poem before his death Edwin Muir wrote,

I have been taught by dreams and fantasies Learned from the friendly and the darker phantoms And got great knowledge and courtesy from the dead … 

Now that his poems are completed, his debts to fantasies and dreams and to the past are clear. His own past had itself the pattern of a quest that disclosed its direction only as it went, a pattern of...