Irving Layton’s new Collected Poems (McClelland and Stewart) is so impressive a book, to the eye, that my first thought was to put away pride and prejudice and acknowledge it as a great achievement. Nothing would be easier, or more pleasant. I’m all for poetry; and to be overcome by it would be the happiest kind of surrender.

Reading the poems, however, I found myself more and more discouraged in these fine expectations. The book does not live up to its impressive bulk or its handsome design. In fact it offends, as Irving Layton’s poetry always does, against the most elementary literary values, in the use of language, in the quality of feeling, in the sense of form. I once championed this poet, for his heroic non‑conformist stance; but many things have changed since then, and I do not find his protestations liberating today, nor his exuberance a help to poetry.

Reading on, I began to ask myself why I could not really take this poetry with critical objectivity; why it seemed to draw me into personal attitudes, in fact into conflict with the author’s personality. I had opened the book with perfect candour and generosity; what was it in the poetry that so repelled me?

Irving Layton and Louis Dudek early 1960s

I believe that Layton’s poetry is admired—where it is admired, by savage young men and by disgruntled chafing adults—entirely for non­literary reasons, for his role as a vicarious rebel against the conventions, as the coarse iconoclast who says what they themselves would like to say, without much art or style. This is not literature. And it is exactly this spurious role, passing for poetry, that repels me. As leaven for literature, the spirit of revolt is excellent, even necessary, but when it becomes the main point of the poetry, and also an excuse for every kind of crudity and vulgarity, I cannot admire it. The poetry loses integrity, or self‑honesty, and becomes merely a platform for horseplay.

The integrity of Irving Layton may be judged from the following example. His book A Red Caret for the Sun (1959), which was already a book of collected poetry (and his second at that), began with the words: “This volume contains all the poems I wrote between 1942 and 1958 that I wish to preserve.” These words give the impression of a truly conscien­tious artist. The present book contains all the same material with the addition of scores of old poems formerly considered not worth pre­serving. I find this procedure questionable. For my part, in fact, I do not see the difference in merit between the poems previously omitted and those included. But there was no truth in the pompous cliché about “all the poems . . . I wish to preserve.” But that is part of the publishing game. The real reason I think it is impossible to deal with Irving Layton's poetry as poetry is that it consists almost entirely of dramatization of his own ego. The typical Layton poem begins thus:

Does he ask me about

my latest poem

and my difficult life

so full of divine chaos?

Or why I, a poet all my days,

had once written him . . .

This dramatization of the self goes on from poem to poem. It is impos­sible to separate Irving Layton—or Layton as he sees himself—from any poetic or artistic content proper. I have actually counted the num­ber of poems in this book in which the grandiose “I” figures as the dominant actor: there are 306 of them. Thirty other poems are satires of the characteristically virulent kind that Layton is noted for:

That owner of duplexes

has enough gold to sink himself

on a battleship. His children,

two sons and a daughter are variations

on the original gleam: that is,

            slobs with a college education.

The raging ego is obviously right behind this kind of “impersonal” satire too: so that we can add these thirty satirical poems to the other lot. Almost all of Layton’s poetry, therefore, is a dramatization of his ego. For anyone who wants to evaluate the poetry, and is not a “personal” admirer, this becomes an insuperable problem. “Interesting if one is interested in Celia,” as Eliot said.

It is highly revealing, I think, that of the remaining poems, which seem to be free of the dramatic ego, some nineteen are from Layton’s very early, youthful poetry. These are mainly at the beginning of the book, though there are later poems interlarded with them. In fact, of the first thirty poems, half are early poems, quite free of ego involvement. But for the rest of the book only about one poem out of ten is free of the intrusive “I”—and even then it may be free only in appearance.

There is no other poet, in any language, who presents this kind of problem—or spectacle—for the reader. William Carlos Williams is a poet of personality; the heart of his poetry is his spontaneous natural self. But examine the poems: how objective, and free they are of the hateful “I.”(Pascal: “le moi est haïssable.”) It is the world, as it appears to Williams, that we are delighted to discover. Layton’s ego is neither spontaneous nor natural; it is hardly even real. It is a fiction; the distorting inflated ego of a man who has indulged in too much self‑worship. And the world he presents is equally distorted. I cannot see how this can make for lasting poetry. It is tremendously “interesting,” as outrageous characters are always interesting, and it may help to free some inhibited “Presbyterians and Loyalists” of their moral bondage. But it has no permanent value. Like Heavysege (“Canada’s Shakespeare”) and E. Pauline Johnson, it is only another sad, Canadian puffed‑up reputation.