The Return of The Labyrinth; notes on Edwin Muir’s poem and its paradoxical dynamics of symbolism

The aim of the paper is to apply selected classical and contemporary conceptions of the labyrinth in a hermeneutic interpretation of the poem The Labyrinth by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir with reference to its conception of space and time, and the notion of subjectivity as the centre of the labyrinth/maze, as well as to point to the poem’s multilayer intertextuality, whose most significant tropes are elaborate transformations of the Minoan myth and modernist inspiration in the work of Kafka. The final part of the article presents the possibility of continuing research on the specificity of the tragic vision presented in the poem in reference to the approach proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar.