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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/180402 |
| Date | 03 June 2011 |
| Creators | Sanborn, Robert E. |
| Contributors | Thornburg, Thomas R. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 169, [6] leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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