SOURCE: "Edwin Muir's Heraldic Mode," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2, July, 1966, pp. 96-103,

In the following essay, Garber focuses on Muir's use of symbols and images from heraldic tradition in his poetry.

Animals, in Edwin Muir's autobiography, occur and reoccur in contexts of guilt and necessity, visions of human bestiality, and dreams that take a variety of moods and shapes reaching back into the racial unconscious. In one passage, Muir recalls a long, fabulous age of pre-history, "populated by heraldic men and legendary beasts," in which our immediate connections with animals revealed themselves when we endowed our heroes with the metaphors of the fox's cunning and the lion's courage, and through this made heroes and totems that embodied the qualities we admired.¹ We worshipped some animals and killed others, and the killing left in us a haunting ambivalence, clothed in ritual, that shared equally in guilt and...