SOURCE: "Edwin Muir's Autobiography," in Poetry, Vol. 87, No. 1, October, 1955, pp. 50-2.

In the following essay, Carruth reviews An Autobiography and discusses the relation of the work to Muir's achievement in poetry,

Several years ago, in a review of his Collected Poems, I said that Edwin Muir was one of the three or four greatest living writers of poetry in English—or words to that effect; I have lost the exact reference. It was a broad statement, embarrassingly broad, and of course I wish I hadn't made it. Not because I think the judgment itself is so very far from the truth of the matter, but rather because such exclusive remarks about living authors always imply a strict comparative view of literature, whereas in fact poems or groups of poems are only occasionally and partially comparable, and to say otherwise is to be both unrealistic and unfair. I knew...