Edwin Muir Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Marie Luhrs

Critical Essay by Marie Luhrs

SOURCE: "Piety and Peace," in Poetry, Vol. 27, No. 1, October, 1925, pp. 50-1.

In the following review, Luhrs focuses on structure and mood in First Poems.

American poetry in the past few years has been so obsessed by painted lips, anatomical love, bright colors, and solid images that a book like Edwin Muir's First Poems is stimulating and refreshing by reason of its drabness. A drabness, however, that does not arise from a sparse imagination or a watery technique, but from an observation that is accurate without being obtrusive. The tone of the book is quiet, and its path is peace. Horses and houses, reveries and remembrances are the subjects of Mr. Muir's inspiration. He writes nearly every poem in quatrains, and lets his idea ramble slowly down many stanzas instead of trying to pack every line with pictures and moods. He has an unusual preoccupation with the universal...
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