SOURCE: "Edwin Muir's 'The Labyrinth': A Study of Symbol and Structure," in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. X, No. 2, October, 1972, pp. 67-78.

In the following essay, Wiseman offers a close examination of "The Labyrinth, " particularly focusing on Muir's symbolist techniques and the nonlogical structure of the poem.

The poems in The Labyrinth (1949) were written in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948, when Edwin Muir was Director of the British Institute in Prague. These were dramatic and tragic years for Muir; so much so that on his return to England in 1948 he suffered a breakdown and withdrew into a state of despairing apathy, "a dead pocket of life",¹ for several months. On his arrival in Prague, after a journey through countries scarred and altered from the war, Muir had been horrified by stories of Nazi atrocities during the recent occupation and the effect this had had on the Czech people, but even...