[In the following review of Edwin Muir's Collected Poems, poet W. S. Merwin compares Muir to Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, and William Wordsworth, and explores the duality of Muir's idealism as reflected in poems such as “Variations on a Time Theme,” “The Annunciation,” “The Island,” and “The Animals.”]

I assume that it was immediately for the work, for a particular aspect of the work, of his own generation that Mr. Eliot wrote the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Mr. Muir is of that generation (though for some reason I am reminded of it constantly with surprise); Collected Poems, I think, shows him to be one of its most significant poets. And Mr. Muir's poetry, in a quite different sense from that of his contemporaries whom I suppose Mr. Eliot has primarily in mind, gives us to re-examine the meaning of “the traditional.” For although I think there is little doubt that Mr. Muir's work is in a good sense “original,” he is not at once remarkable as a formal innovator. With regard to his vocabulary and the mechanics of verse he made no extreme rupture with the current of English poetry as he found it, but developed it rather to his own increasingly certain ends, much as one might say Robert Frost did; indeed there are constant resemblances of cadence and vision between Muir's poetry and some of Frost's. The remarkable ending lines of Muir's “The Guess,” for example:

So that I did not feel that I had willed
These forms, but that a long forgotten guess
Had shown, past chaos, the natural shape we take,

where the similarity is not a matter of echo, but of like ear and intent. The heartening thing is that an achievement as urgent and particular as Mr. Muir's to date is, comprising a kind of vision and mode of thought, rare to English poetry, could have been accomplished when it was, being in so great a degree of formal continuity with the more obvious tradition of English poetry. For a tradition proceeds, it would seem, both by the continuities and by the variations which it can contain alive; as long as it is alive itself it manages to make a continuum out of the necessary departures from itself. The poetry of the imagists, say, of Ezra Pound, of Mr. Eliot himself, enlivened the tradition by departing from it—it had to change in order to include them. Mr. Muir's poetry has shown the tradition continuous in a more direct sense, and in a manner has made it so.

But for all the closeness of his poetic descent from, for example, Wordsworth, Mr. Muir is unmistakably a modern. His diction, despite an occasional early “ere” and “e'er,” is at the same time catholic and colloquial, pared of archaisms and of the particular rhetorics which others of his generation reacted against. More concretely, it seems certainly to have been the influence of the later Yeats which schooled his ear out of an at-times pat handling of “ballad” quatrains, into such cadences as those of “Reading in War-time” and many of the later short-line poems. And his imagery, and more important perhaps his vision and sense of metaphor, are in some ways as “metaphysical” as those of any of his contemporaries. Yet perhaps one reason why the tradition of Wordsworth has proved continually useful to him, is that Mr. Muir's poetry tends to be at once direct and discursive, discursive in a sense in which most of his generation, at least to begin with, were not. At times his subjects seem peculiarly static and he seems to discuss them rather than make them increasingly informative in terms of a constant metaphor; in this sense he is discursive rather than dramatic. This is by no means true of all his poetry, but in several of what appear to be major poems there is a distrust of the metaphor, of the terms of the poem, a need felt to explain rather than expand and deepen the possibilities of representing, and a resultant final lack of authority and wholeness. An example is “The Labyrinth,” where, though I think the poem is successful, its central image is weakened by a passage which steps out of the illusion and comments at length on its relevance—the relevance is not made in the illusion itself. It is natural that the main fault of this kind of poetry should be diffuseness. Further, the emotions behind the poems, however powerful, seem rooted in a deep personal calm, whose poetic advantages, when the poems work, are evident; the drawback, of course, is again the occasional diffuseness, the occasional failure to fire the subject of a poem into a created independent hardness and whole.

I think Mr. Muir is, or has been through most of his life as a poet, an idealist “more than half Platonic,” and I wonder whether the ideal has not been static. I am going entirely on the basis of the poems: I must confess I have not read his book The Story and the Fable, which Mr. J. C. Hall, in his introduction to the Collected Poems, says “should be read by anyone who wishes to understand Muir's work.” I am not sure that I understand entirely what Mr. Hall does expound concerning “the main themes of Muir's poetry”:

As he grew up he saw all around him these ‘evidences of a past but strange life,’ which quickened in him the belief that our life is lived on two planes, the actual and the fabulous. This double vision is the central theme of Muir's poetry. … For the history and evolution of mankind are most easily conceived of as an endless journey through Time, which we can only begin to understand in certain recognisable stages or ‘places.’ ‘One or two stages in it I can recognise; the age of innocence and the Fall. But these lie beyond experience, not on the surface; they are not historical events; they are stages in the Fable. … Every man in a sense re-enacts the fable in his own life. He is deeply implicated in the labyrinth of his past, which is the past of all mankind. The aim of all spiritual endeavour is to try to find a way out of this labyrinth towards the light, to re-discover “the drowned original of the soul.”’ It is not surprising, then, that Time is the great antagonist in Muir's spiritual drama.

Insofar as the poems bear out this reading of Muir's main theme, Time is indeed the difficulty. Whether the fable exists in time parallel with the story, or whether it is a fixed paradigm, and time and the actual, the story, merely play across it, or whether it is not in time at all, is not clear. If it exists in time along with the story, the relation of the one to the other sometimes seems little more than casual. Yet what Mr. Muir's poems often appear to be evoking or describing as intimations of the fable is a literal escape from time; innocence, which he sees as a stage in the fable, at times seems synonymous with “timelessness.” Or are there only a few stages in the fable, and these existed before time, may exist after time, at any rate are relieved of the condition of time? It is Mr. Muir's insistence that the fabulous world is “other” than, not part of, the actual one which puzzles me—due no doubt to realist limitations of my own. If the two “planes” of life were named as metaphors of each other, mutually making and containing each other, they might be recognized as, perhaps, imagination and reality, and the continuous moment in which they created, celebrated, became, each other might be seen as containing all time, as eternal. But it seems to me that through most of his work the fable has been for Mr. Muir, at least overtly, a kind of paradigm, ideal and static, across which moves the figures of process, aspiring blindly and impossibly to its fixity.

And this idealist duality seems to me to have been for long the dilemma and source of tension in Mr. Muir's “thought,” or at any rate in his poetry insofar as it has been a discursive exposition of opinion. There is no reason why poetry, even great poetry, need do more than state a dilemma, and many of Mr. Muir's finest poems do precisely that. In some of the best of his poems, however, and particularly among the most recent ones, Mr. Muir's imagination fuses the dilemma into a unity, conceives of the moment of metaphor as making reality, as rounding and containing time. Already in the third part of “Variations on a Time Theme” an individual dilemma is described, between Indifference and Pity, and the one possible reconciliation seen is a dramatization, a presentation of the actual which fosters both parts:

Pity would cancel what it feeds upon,
And gladly cease, its office done.
Yet could it end all passion, flaw, offense,
Would come my homespun fiend Indifference
And have me wholly. …
Then must dead Pity, quickened by my plight,
Start up again and make for my delight
A mimic stage where all the day
A phantom hound pursues a phantom prey,
Where the slain rise and smile upon the slayer,
And cunning is a fond deceit,
Treachery feigned and less imaginary,
And friends consent to meet
To stage a slaughter and make up a story.
Oh, then, at such deceitful art,
Tears, real and burning, from my lids would start.
And peace would burst into my heart.

For the terms of representation of a dilemma are the terms in which it may become a unity. Mr. Muir's control of these terms has always been distinguished, but particularly such recent poems as “The Annunciation” (the second of the name), “The Island,” “One Foot in Eden”—

But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies;

—and the miraculous “The Animals,” convince me that his vision has come to embrace a new faith in the imagination's power to make real and one. A sense of a unity in the world's duality is not recent to his work, but I should be tempted to call it a deepening sense of reality which makes him see time and the past, life's essentials if not its particulars, as cyclical and at each moment present in “The Island” (it is interesting to compare this poem with the earlier “The Recurrence”), and which allows him, in “The Animals,” to declare:

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But in any case his poems, as any worth the name, exist as poems not as notions, are made not thought, are evidence, as poems, of a sense of reality not bounded by opinions, his own or another's. The best of his poems—and they are not few—are of a scope, power and stature which rank him among the genuinely important poets of our time, and I should think his achievement is very possibly major.