SOURCE: Mellown, Elgin W. “The Poet: Poems of the 1920s and 1930s.” In Edwin Muir, pp. 88-104. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.

In the following essay, Mellown provides an overview of First Poems (1925), Chorus of the Newly Dead (1929), Six Poems (1932), Variations on a Time Theme (1934), and Journeys and Places (1937).

Although Edwin Muir stands apart from the experimental poets whose innovations have changed the course of twentieth-century literature, he holds an important place in the tradition of contemplative verse. His poems reflect not his age but rather traditional wisdom seen through his age, while his philosophy, although influenced by the movements of his time, is basically neo-Platonic and Christian. The nature of his poems can perhaps best be understood by remembering that he was thirty-five years old when he seriously began writing verse, and that he was well into his fifties before he consistently expressed himself with skill and created poems...