| Author Quoted | Edwin Muir |
| Title Quoted | Estate of Poetry |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1966/07/31 |
| Imprint | Cambridge MA : Harvard University Press. 1962 |
| Quotation | Small wonder that I have in these weeks walked in the world of folk-song and passion - the only one adequate for my perplexities (well, Gregorian is too, thank God). I realize, reading Muir's lecture on "The Natural Estat" of poetry [in The Estate of Poetry, 1962], what the real hermit temptation is: it is to go off with the elves. To take the "Road to Fair Elfland" with the Queen of the Elves - which is neither the narrow thorny path of righteousness nor the broad path of wickedness. That has been my persuasion - that there was another purely free and neutral road, love for M. in our own kind of woods and Cherokee Park (note "Clerk Saunders and May Margaret"!!). It is True Thoreau the layman who goes to Elfland for seven years and then returns! |
| Quotation Source | Learning to love: exploring solitude and freedom. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 6, 1966-1967.; Edited by Christine M. Bochen. / [San Francisco] : HarperCollins. 1997, p. 105-06 |
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| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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