SOURCE: "Edwin Muir's Last Poems," in The University of Windsor Review, Vol. X, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1974, pp. 5-20.

In the following essay, Wiseman discusses Muir's poems of the late 1950s.

In the Collected Poems¹ are thirty-nine poems written by Edwin Muir between the time One Foot in Eden was accepted by Faber in 1955 and his death in 1959. Of these, twenty-two were published in periodicals or sent to Faber in manuscript form, six were found in typescript after his death, and the remainder were reconstructed from his papers. Had he lived to publish another collection, Muir would certainly have made revisions to some of these poems, but as they stand these last poems contain some of his finest work which has been curiously neglected by the critics.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about these poems, when one remembers that Muir was in his late sixties and seventies when they were...