The poems and novels of Edwin Muir are closely linked by their themes and images, and the insights reached in the mature poems resolve the problems implicit in the earlier, less successful work. Despite its thematic unity, however, Muir’s poetry is not the expression of a conscious, systematic view of the world, but a sustained attempt to create a sense of the depths inherent in human experience. His poems aspire not towards a statement of truth, but towards a sense of total presence, in which being is infused with consciousness. The experience of presence is reached through the imaginative experience of absence, when the barriers between the mind and the world seem insurmountable. The thesis examines the growth and resolution of this dualistic vision of life, with its roots in Muir’s early experience. His years of poverty in Glasgow forced him to see man's misery and degradation, yet in his dreams he experienced states of limitless union and freedom, which seemed to show that the human being is not bound by time and circumstance. Muir's creative phase began in Germany, when his reading of German poets and novelists helped him to set his experience of suffering and deprivation within an imaginative vision of life. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The poetry of Edwin Muir has inspired a distinctive body of criticism. Realizing that his poetry is inexorably linked with his life, Roger Knight, Michael Phillips, Peter Butter and others have produced fine studies of his work against a biographical background. Margaret Anderson has contributed an important dissertation on the importance of dualism in the poems. R. P. Blackmur, J. R. Watson and Kathleen Raine have published articles that are central in informing any new Muir scholarship.This study intends to illuminate the source of Muir's inspiration, to show that his imagery is drawn from the mythos. A general review of Muir criticism supports the theory that the imaginative background he knew as the Fable, which underlies all temporal human behavior (labeled as the Story) is also the collective unconscious of Jung, the Spiritus Mundi of Yeats, the "inseeing" of Rilke, and the Mythos of Aristotle.The study reviews Muir criticism and the poetic technique of Muir, develops a special definition of "mythos" and goes on, through the explication of selected Muir poems, to show how his poetic and philosophical growth was influenced by his unique ability to gain access to the most powerful of Aristotle's four modes of Rhetoric. Finally, the study crystalizes Muir's overall aesthetic in the oxymoronic conclusion to his 1956 masterpiece, "The Horses," the term "free servitude."Muir felt that we can only function at our full potential when we use the power of our imagination to realize the essential duality of the human condition. We are, to an extent, free, and in a state of servitude. In Freudian terms, the superego enslaves us through guilt and our debt to the concept of civilization, while the id urges us on the ultimate freedom represented by the unchecked expression of violence and sex.The study concludes with an examination of Muir's final enigmatic symbol, found in the title of his last collection of poems: One Foot in Eden. Man, through the imaginative realization of his immortality, may plant one foot in Eden; the other foot remains trapped in the Labyrinth, Muir's symbol for the bewildering, impersonal complexity of our twentieth century beaurocractic wasteland. The transcendence of this entrapment gave Muir his purpose, in life and in art.

Edwin Muir's poetic vision is bound up with that belief in a twofold structure of reality that in European culture has been called Platonist but which is so ancient and widespread that no one can determine its origins. Though no longer fashionable in a time when materialist philosophies flourish and even Christian clerics are busy "de-mythologizing" their faith, it has been the potent source of our greatest poetry and perhaps, as Kathleen Raine believes, of all true poetry. Those who hold this conviction regard the sensible world as the reflection of an "intelligible" or spiritual world which gives meaning and purpose to life, and they see the objects of nature as images that evoke the ideal forms of a divine reality. For poets, as for traditional men, this belief is less a metaphysic than an intuitive way of apprehending and ordering experience, a "learning of the imagination" inherited from ancient and mysterious sources. To Muir it came directly and spontaneously in the symbolic images of dreams, and the fact that he entitled the first version of his autobiography The Story and the Fable testifies to the importance, both for his life and his poetry, of his belief in two corresponding orders of experience. Intro., p. 1-2.

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