SOURCE: "Muir and the Critics," in Edwin Muir: A Master of Modern Poetry, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978, pp. 137-59.

In the following essay, Phillips surveys critical assessments of Muir's work.

The nature and appeal of Muir's work have been the most important factor in the rise of his reputation; but the warm reception offered by discerning critics in the late fifties and the sixties has been a factor as well. The fact that Muir's poetry was published in his later years by Faber (a firm with which one associates T. S. Eliot) must have helped his cause considerably. The first Collected Poems: 1921-1952¹ appeared in 1952 in Great Britain with the Faber imprint, and the confidence of critics and readers must have been enhanced by Eliot's preface to the 1965 Collected Poems:

And as I have grown older, 1 have come to realise how rare this quality is. That utter honesty...