SOURCE: "Initiation and Tragedy: A New Look at Edwin Muir's The Gate'," in PMLA, Vol. 80, No. 1, January, 1972, pp. 75-9.

In the following essay, Huberman discusses innocence and experience in "The Gate. "

Although since Edwin Muir's death ten years ago, his prestige as a poet has steadily increased, his poetry has been subjected to remarkably little critical examination. His Collected Poems (1952, 1960) and his final volume, One Foot in Eden (1956), were widely and for the most part favorably reviewed; many warm appreciations of his entire work appeared both in the United States and in England at the time of his death; and over the years a few general studies of his poetry, or of certain themes in his poetry, have been published in various journals and surveys of contemporary verse. Aside from Peter Butter, however, in his booklet, Edwin Muir (New York: Grove Press, 1962), and in his full-length biography and...