SOURCE: "Eden's Gate; The Later Poetry of Edwin Muir," in The Personalist, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, January, 1963, pp. 58-78.

In the following essay, Mills examines key subjects and themes in Muir's later poetry.

It is difficult to think of Edwin Muir without calling to mind those simple, lonely, and nearly anonymous figures populating so many of his poems. However modestly he spoke of his life in An Autobiography and elsewhere, it was, as Stephen Spender once remarked of it, a pilgrimage, an interior journey which gave a fundamental spiritual meaning to his actual travels. Though Muir traveled a good deal in his lifetime, in a certain profound sense he never left the environment into which he was born—his father's small, productive farm in the midst of the Orkney Islands. When he was still young, his father sold the farm and the family departed for the mainland. The sudden...