SOURCE: "The Achievement of Edwin Muir," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. II, No. 2, Winter, 1961, pp. 240-60.

In the following essay, Summers surveys Muir's most important works in such genres as autobiography, criticism, and poetry,

With the publication of Edwin Muir's Collected Poems (1952), his Autobiography (1954), and One Foot in Eden (1956), many readers made the disconcerting discovery that someone had been writing important poetry and prose for a number of years without their attention or help. Despite all the praise that those volumes have received, many of Muir's new admirers have still not fully recognized the range of his achievement. Born in 1887, Muir published his first volume of prose in 1918 and his last volume of poetry in 1956. At the time of his death in 1959, he was still writing new poems and working on a book on the Scottish ballads. He published seven volumes of literary and social criticism (including one...