SOURCE: Hixson, Allie Corbin. “The Natural Poet.” In Edwin Muir: A Critical Study, pp. 137-76. New York: Vantage Press, 1977.

In the following essay from a scholarly book on Muir's life and work, Hixson suggests that reading First Poems (1925), which Muir published at age thirty-five, alongside The Labyrinth (1949), written after the Second World War, provides an understanding of the development of Muir's “exceptional poetic imagination.”

                                        … since I came out that day, There have been times when I have heard my footsteps Still echoing in the maze. … 

—Muir, “The Labyrinth” (1947)

Edwin Muir took up the craft of poetry when he was thirty-five and established himself as an English poet in the interim between his Nietzschean period, which ended with psychoanalysis in 1921, and his divergence from the Lallans poets in the 1930s. He began writing poetry out of a personal need to halt the forward rush of Time:

As if I...