SOURCE: "In Time's Despite: On the Poetry of Edwin Muir," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXI, No. 3, July-September, 1973, pp. 633-58.

In the following essay, Keeble discusses the major symbols, themes, and philosophical views apparent in Muir's poetry.

As this, our most dreadful century yet, moves into its last quarter, it becomes even more difficult to deny that the total collapse of our civilization is imminent. The dream of an earthly paradise, bequeathed us by the nineteenth-century idea of "progress" and "evolution", seems as far off as ever before. The labyrinthine struggle in the maze of our own making is characterized by one thing above all else—our seeming refusal to allow any light from a source higher than that of our own "humanity" to throw an illuminating ray upon the nature of a chaos that is in reality the manifestation of our state of mind. As a consequence...