Mr. Irving Layton, to fit him quickly into the curriculum, should be brackted with, say, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley…. Canada provides him with a situation, not a tradition. He belongs to the anti-academic wing … of the American poetic generation, a little younger than Auden and Spender, whose right and center fill the better-capitalized quarterlies with cat's-cradle Meditations and grey flannel Suites: the generation that succeeded and should have inherited the achievements of Pound, Eliot, and Williams but could never grasp what they were up to. Mr. Layton's disdain for this poetic right and center is implicit; he will have us perceive that, though a wag, he is no Winters' tail. "If I'm not mistaken," he assures us on the front flap of A Laughter in the Mind, "the book is my best to date." [He is not mistaken. Sheer practice has lifted him to steady distinction.]… He inhabits roughly that quarter that ignores Eliot as a conformist, delights in Pound chiefly for the fact that he was fired from the only academic job he ever had …, and takes from Dr. Williams what it can use, the aggressive notation of raw particulars.

And Mr. Layton—to move directly to his chief strength—is peerless in the directness with which he can note

               the tight smile
               Cats have for meeting death….
                                  (pp. 413-15)

With this daintiness, however, there cohabits a violence of imagination that can dispel rhythms, scatter tropes like ninepins, and occasionally blow a whole poem to tatters. It is an allotrope of aggressive masculinity…. [In Parting, we can see the vices by which Mr. Layton is always menaced]: rhymes clotting sense, aberrances of diction … jog-trot facility, and syntax that gropes forward through unnecessary lines for a convenient place to end the sentence. There is hardly a poem in A Laughter in the Mind that does not at some point contain too many words or too many lines, and hardly one that has not some memorable feat of vigor. Sheep, for instance, with its "fine musicians' faces" and "ebony line of the mouth, curving long and thin", on its way to a strong ending flounders in lamentable à peu près…. (pp. 415-16)

To complain in this way is to reprove indomitably interesting poems by the only relevant criterion, their own logic. They don't prolong a literary tradition, Canadian or other. The poetic situation, or absence of a poetic situation, in Mr. Layton's country of domicile confers on him the rare privilege of freedom from received procedures (though it does not discourage a received irreverent stance), and he in turn has the exceedingly rare energy that can fill a void with its own strength. There are bards as catachrestic as he in the North American attic, who throw themselves aimlessly about or stand around inhibited by the absence of chairs, or indulge in shapeless pieces of horseplay. There are also lady poets crocheting antimacassars for the packing-cases. Mr. Layton meanwhile has had the sense to see that he must create the situations within which he performs:

       And I who gave my Kate a blackened eye
       Did to its vivid changing colours
       Make up an incredible musical scale;
       And now I balance on wooden stilts and dance
       And thereby sing to the loftiest casements….

It is into such fictions that Mr. Layton's imaginative energy flows; the writing is simply good enough, perhaps often hasty; hundreds of poems have improved it without basing it on principle. He does not mind figuring as cynic, clown, lecher, or benevolent Caliban, father, historian, or tavern wit; he senses, apparently, that the only way for him to function in such a milieu is to work out the implications of self-sufficient acts of the imagination. The Widows does this; so does Laurentian Rhapsody; so do Parting, Individualists, the remarkable Cain, and other poems which the reader is advised to try for himself…. (pp. 417-18)