SOURCE: "Edwin Muir: The Story and the Fable," in The Yale Review, Vol. LV, No. 3, March, 1966, pp. 403-26. [In the following essay, Hoffman examines myth and tradition underlying Muir's poetry.]

In the last poem before his death Edwin Muir wrote,

I have been taught by dreams and fantasies
 Learned from the friendly and the darker phantoms
 And got great knowledge and courtesy from the dead. . . .

Now that his poems are completed, his debts to fantasies and dreams and to the past are clear. His own past had itself the pattern of a quest which disclosed its direction only as it went along, a pattern of continual revelation. And that direction seems a recapitulation in a single life of the fall of a society from pastoral innocence to the sufferings of modern man. Muir knew at first hand not only the dour poverty of the industrial slums but the...