Edwin Muir Critical Essay | Critical Review by W. S. Merwin

Critical Review by W. S. Merwin

SOURCE: Merwin, W. S. “Four British Poets.” The Kenyon Review 15, no. 3 (summer 1953): 468-72.

In the following review of Edwin Muir's Collected Poems, poet W. S. Merwin compares Muir to Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, and William Wordsworth, and explores the duality of Muir's idealism as reflected in poems such as “Variations on a Time Theme,” “The Annunciation,” “The Island,” and “The Animals.”

I assume that it was immediately for the work, for a particular aspect of the work, of his own generation that Mr. Eliot wrote the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Mr. Muir is of that generation (though for some reason I am reminded of it constantly with surprise); Collected Poems, I think, shows him to be one of its most significant poets. And Mr. Muir's poetry, in a quite different sense from that of his contemporaries whom I suppose Mr. Eliot has primarily in...
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