SOURCE: Crawford, Thomas. “Edwin Muir as a Political Poet.” In Literature of the North, edited by David Hewitt and Michael Spiller, pp. 121-33. Great Britain: Aberdeen University Press, 1983.

In the following essay from an anthology about Scottish writers, Crawford reflects upon the ways in which such poems as “The Good Town,” “After a Hypothetical War,” “The Interrogation,” and “The Castle” address “particular and general aspects of man's inhumanity to man.”

In Britain, as I write, over three million persons are unemployed. In Scotland, hearts are faint and spirits are low three years after the devolution referendum; the nation seems in limbo, with little will to seek Scottish solutions to Scottish problems. In Poland, social heroism and public virtue have once more been brutally assaulted; once more, an imposed communism has been shown to be morally and politically misshapen. And in every corner of the world, more insistently than...