SOURCE: "On Edwin Muir," in Shooting the Works: On Poetry and Pictures, Triquarterly Books, 1990, pp. 59-69.

In the following essay, Di Piero considers sources, themes, and philosophical viewpoint in Muir's poetry.

Reviewing the Collected Poems in 1955, Edwin Muir criticized Wallace Stevens for following too obediently the aesthetic patterns contrived by his own mind, and for allowing his speculative nature to turn him away from life "to an imaginary world of beautiful objects, of peaches and pears." Stevens's desired world, even if occupied with things that satisfy the senses, remains a place which Muir calls "a legendary world without a legend." What he means, I think, is that Stevens's imagination, though much at ease among the fabulous, lacked the grounding and precedence of fable, that he could speculate on techniques of the mythy mind but did not possess such a mind. Frost was the more appealing poet, because he...