[After reading his Collected Poems I find that] Irving Layton is a poet whom one reads at his best with delight, and at his worst with a puzzled wonder that so good a poet could write and—even more astonishing—could publish such wretched verse…. (p. 5)

For all his flamboyance of manner, Layton is capable of some extraordinary lapses into mere triteness and triviality…. He can also perpetuate, with a coy archness that seems out of character, some of the weakest jokes that can ever have been given the shape of verse…. (pp. 6-7)

[Layton] is one of those half-fortunate writers who have a way with words and phrases, an almost fatal ability to make a statement on any subject in a heightened rhetorical manner, without necessarily producing more than a chunk of coloured prose chopped into lines or a doggerel jingle; when he cannot write a poem on a theme that stirs his emotions, he produces one of these hybrid verse compositions. With the curious purblindness that afflicts people possessed of such facile gifts, he seems unable to realize that his good poems are something quite different from his bad verse, and defends both with equal vigour. (p. 7)

[Layton has produced a body of work] which varies so remarkably from the atrocious to the excellent, and which shows a failure of self-evaluation as monstrous as that displayed by D. H. Lawrence, who in so many ways resembled, anticipated and influenced Layton. To grasp Layton is rather like trying to grasp Proteus. But Proteus was grasped, and so must Layton be, for behind the many disguises an exceptionally fine poet lurks in hiding. (pp. 7-8)

From the beginning, Layton shows a romantic absorption with the poet as personality as well as with the poetry he produces. He sees himself as the vehicle of the divine frenzy of inspiration…. And the writing of poetry involves for him not only a kind of inspirational possession, but also other elements of the magical vocation of the shaman; particularly joy and power…. (p. 8)

Possession, indeed, gives the poet a special, privileged status; he is different from other men, and his powers bring responsibilities that go beyond the mere production of good poems. He is the prophet, the philosopher, the leader of thought, and Shelley's unacknowledged legislators of the world are never far from one's mind when one reads Layton talking in this vein, as he does in the Foreword to the Collected Poems. The poet, he tells us, has a "prophetic vocation to lead his fellow men towards sanity and light." But it is precisely this vocation which turns the poet into the misunderstood and persecuted rebel-martyr with whom Layton identifies himself. (p. 9)

I applaud Layton's desire to flout conformity and attack its supporters, and if this were all I would gladly stand shouting beside him. But I cannot see any necessary connection between rebellion of this kind and the vocation of the poet. That vocation, surely, is no more than to write poetry, and a good poet can even stand for insanity and darkness, as Yeats sometimes did…. The social and moral rebel is something different, though the two may be and often are united. Layton takes it for granted that they must be united; this, to be necessarily paradoxical, is the classic romantic stance, and Layton, in upholding it, is a traditional wild man according to conventions laid down early in the nineteenth century. His essential neo-romanticism crops up in many other ways: in his "anti-literary" stance when his poems are as crammed with literary and classical tags and allusions as the prose of any despised man-of-letters; in his "anti-academic" attitude when … he is a university graduate who—as his poems about lectures and students show—has been lurking for years in the underbrush of the academic groves. It manifests itself also in the archaic images and phrases which embellish even Layton's most recent poems with an undeniable tinge of antique poeticism. (pp. 9-10)

The concept of the romantic poet provides, to begin, a justification for Layton's Saint Sebastian attitude. In fact, it is nothing more than a logical extension of the illogical idea of the poet as prophet; if the poet is really inspired, if it is really the gods (whatever they represent) who make him howl, then he is one of the chosen, against whom criticism or even competition is not merely an act of presumption but also something very near to religious persecution. Such an attitude cannot simply be waved away…. [Layton] feels his isolation as a poet and a man deeply, so deeply that it has inspired not only such malicious attacks on his fellow poets as figure in the "Prologue to the Long Pea-Shooter" but also such a powerful vision of the fate of the rebel in the world of conformity as "The Cage". More than that, this feeling plays its ultimate part in the compassionate self-identification with the destroyed innocents of the animal and human worlds which inspires those of his poems that touch nearest to greatness and which pleads pardon for his arrogance towards his peers.

But there is another side to the idea of poetic inspiration. If it is blasphemous for others to criticize what the poet has written in the fine fury of possession, may it not also be an act of hubris for the poet himself to reject or diminish the godly gift? The whole vision of the poet as prophet denies not only the function of the critic; more seriously, it deprives the poet of the self-critical faculty which in all artistic activity is the necessary and natural balance to the irrational forces of the creative impulse. Once a poet sees himself as a vehicle for anything outside him, whether he calls it God or the Muse or Truth or, in Layton's words, "sanity and light", he abdicates the power of rational choice, and it is only logical that he should cease to discriminate between his best and his worst works, that he should seriously publish, in the same retrospective collection, a poem like The Predator, where pity and anger magnificently coalesce in the final verses … and a joking jingle, like Diversion, of a kind which any versifier might whip up at two for a dollar. (pp. 10-11)

The problem of Layton's switchback career as a poet, which makes one's reactions to his Collected Poems take the form of a wildly dipping and climbing seismograph, cannot be solved merely by suggesting that he is deliberately unselective or incapable of selection. That might be argued for a poet whose successes, when they came, were obviously the product of deep irrational urges which rarely and unexpectedly broke into the dull cycle of an undistinguished existence and produced a masterpiece that astonished its creator; there have, very occasionally, been such writers, but Layton is not one of them. On the contrary, on reading the Collected Poems, one is left with the impression of having been in the company of a trained and versatile craftsman liable to sudden fits of contempt for his public, in which he tries to palm off on them fragments of worn-out fustian instead of lengths of silk. (p. 12)

[Let us] consider the versatility which, from the earliest examples published in the Collected Poems, characterizes Layton's art. He is adept at the lyrically descriptive vignette…. He can make a compassionate statement in well-turned verse of almost Marvellian grace and graciousness, as in "Mrs. Fornheim, Refugee", his small elegy for a former language student who died of cancer…. He presents, on occasion, mordant examples of epigrammatic wit, quite different from the snickering jokes of some of his later poems…. And he shows a fine adeptness in that admirable practice game of the young poet, the parody. (pp. 13-14)

In this early Layton the craftsmanship is usually careful and deliberate: at times, even, almost excessively precise and mannered…. (p. 14)

Evident from the beginning, among the experimental styles and often borrowed manners of the earlier poems, is an unfailing vitality and inventiveness. When Layton forgets to argue, when he lets his fancy go, and then holds it to its course with the reins of careful technique, we get his best work. It can be as luminously coloured and dreamlike as a painting by Chagall…. And at another time it can combine those two strong Laytonian elements, the pastoral and the apocalyptic, in a vision of the natural world as concentrated and intense as "Halos at Lac Marie Louise." (p. 15)

With the growing assurance of Layton's later phases comes a limbering of the rather stiff rhythms which mar some of the earlier poems, and this change is one of the liberating elements in his more interesting works, in the sparkling fluency of that extraordinary erotic fantasia, "The Day Aviva Came to Paris", and, on a completely different level, in the questioning sombreness of "Fornalutx", a ballad of disappointment with a Spanish town….

Even in "Fornalutx" one sees, at least to a degree, the negative aspect of the greater assurance with which Layton has written as the years have gone by. The verse is inclined to be loose rather than limber, careless rather than carefree. A little more work, one feels, and it could have been a much more concentrated and more effective poem. But "Fornalutx" has still, within its limitations, something to say. Many of the other poems which Layton has written in recent years are not merely slipshod; they are also pointless—superficial versicles, empty jests, malicious, misfiring jibes. (p. 16)

If we dismiss the Philistine explanations, that the poet cannot write any better, or does not know the difference between good and bad writing, how are we to explain the fact that Layton persists in publishing verses which he knows the critics will condemn, and often condemn with justification?… [I think the explanation is to be found in the relationship] between the poet-prophet and the romantic clown. In a fine poem which greatly illuminates his attitude towards his own role, he begins with the title statement, "Whatever else poetry is freedom", and, having thus taken license, presents himself as the clown of such freedom. (pp. 16-17)

[The romantic idea of poetry] as "freedom" suggests that the poet should be liberated from any limits his own conscious craftsmanship or the requirements of the critics may impose (thus bringing us back in a disguised circle to the idea of the poet as the vehicle of an inspiration which it is blasphemous to criticize) and it establishes the reign of Saturn in which the respectable, the acknowledged, the established shall all be brought down, and all standards of behaviour (poetic in this case) shall be disregarded. The clown becomes the king in this Saturnalia…. (p. 17)

In romantic tradition the clown represents rebellion against human conventions: he suffers from his fellows, but he has also the privilege of flouting and playing tricks on them, and it is under this mask that Layton presents those of his poems which, according to any recognizable criterion of quality must be rejected, but which he demands should be heard in the name of the poet's sacred freedom.

The figure of the clown is related to two other of Layton's personae, the lover and the misanthrope. Layton's erotic poems … must be taken seriously, but not solemnly. For Layton sex is a matter of comedy, of joy and zest and sometimes of laughter as loud as that of Apuleius or Rabelais. He recognizes the paradox of its glory and its absurdity…. (p. 18)

This is not to say that Layton's erotic poems—any more than his other works—are uniformly successful. Some are shockers, though Layton has much less of a predilection for four-letter words than his legend suggests…. And some of the best are those in which the eroticism is not obvious, but which in tender sadness explore the complexity of human relationships that spring from the early raptures of love. "Berry Picking" is a particularly good example. The poet watches his wife picking berries, and reflects on the changes marriage has brought in her attitude; now he can only "vex and perplex" her. (pp. 18-19)

In poems like this the comic view of sex is suffused with darkness, and the mood merges into the tragic view which Layton, clown and prophet alike, takes of Man, the creature whose own flaws destroy him. Here moralist and misanthrope come together in Layton as they did in Swift; the suffering poet, victim and thus exemplar of human perfidy, joins them. Beginning with the old radical ideals of brotherhood and, to use his own words, "sanity and love", Layton suffers the radical's disillusionment. Man, as he is now, has damned himself by his rejection of life. The poet, who stands still for life, must retreat into solitude. (p. 19)

At its height, as in "The Improved Binoculars", Layton's rejection of humanity in his time and world reaches the level of apocalyptic vision, where he sees a city in flames and all its inhabitants seeking not merely to save themselves but also to profit from the delightful fact that their fellows are suffering…. In this world of apocalypse, the poet appears as victim, slaughtered by the well-bred and cultured killer in a scene of Kafkaesque politeness and malice ("The Executioner").

Here he becomes identified with all those victims of man, and particularly those innocents of the animal world, for whom his compassion issues in a series of remarkable poems, "The Bull Calf"; "Cat Dying in Autumn", "The Predator". To my mind, "The Bull Calf" is not only one of Layton's best poems; it is also one of the most moving poems of our generation. The calf, only just born, yet shapely, full of pride and "the promise of sovereignty", must be slaughtered because, as the farmer says, there is "No money in bull calves". (pp. 19-20)

It is not only the animal world in its suffering that Layton celebrates with such eloquent compassion. He dedicates it also to those men and women who in some way show, in misfortune, qualities of dignity and feeling that place them outside the herd of hostile humanity: to the idiot who shames him by showing a pitiful understanding of a dog's suffering ("The Imbecile"); to an old crippled man defying his fate as "Death's frail, quixotic antagonist" ("Ballad of the Old Spaniard"); and, in one of his most complexly haunting poems ("Das Wahre Ich"), as a Jew to a woman who was once a Nazi….

In fine, Layton is a poet in the old romantic sense, a Dichter, flamboyant, rowdy, angry, tortured, tender, versatile, voluble, ready for the occasion as well as the inspiration, keeping his hand constantly in, and mingling personal griefs and joys with the themes and visions of human destiny. Lately a somewhat negative element seems to have entered his poems; he is conscious of time beginning to sap the sources of life, he adjusts reluctantly to his own aging, he dwells on the unhappier aspects of sex, suspicious of the infidelity of women, of the untrustworthiness of friends. He is obviously at a point of transition, but his vigour will carry him over this and other weirs. Whatever happens, we shall have to take Layton as he comes and wishes, the good and the bad together; but that is better than not having him at all. For my last feeling, after journeying … with Layton in the form of his Collected Poems, was that of having been in the disturbing company of one of the men of my generation who will not be forgotten. (p. 21)

George Woodcock, "A Grab at Proteus: Notes on Irving Layton," in Canadian Literature, No. 28, Spring, 1966, pp. 5-21.