In 1954 Irving Layton published two volumes of verse that stood out as remarkable in a year that was distinguished by several books of more than usual merit…. One of Mr. Layton's books, The Long Pea-shooter, was mainly satirical; the other In the Midst of my Fever, was entirely serious, though not at all solemn. It contained a number of poems that are not only far above anything he has done before but are as fine as any written by a poet of Mr. Layton's generation in America.

[In 1955 Mr. Layton] also published two volumes; and again one is chiefly satirical (The Blue Propeller) while the other (The Cold Green Element) is lyrical and dramatic. Neither of these books seems to me quite as good as its predecessor, though The Cold Green Element has so much in it that is both original and excellent that it stands out as the most remarkable achievement of another very fruitful year in Canadian poetry.

The most prolific and perhaps the most fluent Canadian poet since Bliss Carman, Layton has published eight privately printed volumes since 1945 and has fought a continuous running engagement with reviewers and critics. The opposition or neglect his early work encountered is not to be attributed entirely to stupidity or cowardice on the part of the reviewers. It would have required second-sight, or friendly partiality, to foretell from the poetry he published before 1954 the high order of excellence shown by In the Midst of my Fever and The Gold Green Element, and there was much in the earlier books (as there is a little in the later) which seemed arrogant, puerile, or deliberately offensive. Mr. Layton set himself up as a demolisher of the genteel tradition—in itself a worthy enough undertaking, heaven knows—but it is not so easy to succeed in as the enthusiast hopes. To make any real progress in it requires a measure of sophistication and humility that Mr. Layton achieves in his two best books but which is conspicuously absent from the early ones, and not too evident in his avowedly satirical ones, where perhaps sophistication and humility are most needed. Wherever Mr. Layton has been least successful one discovers a petulant fascination with sexual and functional processes and a childish flaunting of four-letter words that seem to be flung about with an angry rather than a joyous abandon. (pp. 587-88)

Mr. Layton has come [very far] in the two masterful volumes of 1954 and 1955. Mr. Layton, it is clear, has been one of those poets who has to write too much in order to be able to write at all. He loves everything he writes, even the unsuccessful experiments—perhaps most of all the unsuccessful experiments, as a mother loves the ugly child best—and instead of throwing them in the waste basket or filing them away for future revision, he swells a volume with them. But this habit, if it has been hard on the reader, has been good for the poet. Practice in his craft has now made him well nigh perfect, at least in a score of superb poems. The self-confidence that looked like arrogance in the early verse and the savage indignation that looked like mere contempt have ripened in quality and grown in sharpness. In the new successes imagery and rhythm alike have taken on a precise and exciting inevitability that testifies to a technical virtuosity that only a very skilful critic could have foreseen from the early volumes. (p. 588)

What more precisely, it is time to ask, are the qualities which especially distinguish The Cold Green Element, as they did In the Midst of my Fever? To describe them it is necessary to separate them, though it is their final overall and unified effect that gives them their significance. I would single out first a mastery of rhythm, which controls the speed and direction of emotional intensity within an often elaborate and formal stanza pattern. In such poems as Composition in Late Spring, Metzinger: Girl with a Bird, or The Bird of Tragedy in the earlier volume, and Boys in October, The Cold Green Element, Orpheus, or I would for your sake be gentle in the later, there is an unmistakable fluctuation of thought and feeling that rises in part from the metrical rightness of phrase, sentence, and paragraph. This is verse that is written as well as prose; but even in its most homely and familiar moods it is never prosaic. The prevailing rhythms of speech, and the diction generally is colloquial. But when necessary—at climactic moments that seem to be selected with a lucky rightness—language and rhythm take on a richness and emphasis that gives an effect that is sometimes purely lyrical and sometimes has a classic and monumental stillness. Any of the poems above will illustrate the lyrical or dramatic movement that flows consistently and variously through whirls and eddies to an often surprising but perfectly right conclusion. (p. 589)

The naturalness and originality of [observation shown in Layton's poems] … are virtues that go deeper than technical accomplishment and come from the sensibility and character of the poet. The technical virtuosity, of course, does itself rise out of feelings and convictions about the significance of experience and the place of man in nature and society. As a result, the poems are rooted in a personal here and now, and emotion and thought grow out of physical sensation. Mr. Layton has taken to heart the dictum of his master, William Carlos Williams: "Say it: no ideas but in things"—which doesn't mean "no ideas". These poems are full of ideas: but they are ideas which emerge from the whole being, which includes, we are constantly reminded, the glands, pores, muscles, nerve centres, and ganglia, as well as the mind that organizes, even if it cannot always control or command. After Whitman and Lawrence it has become possible for a poet of Mr. Layton's generation to take the physical side of our nature for granted and write about it without fuss or apology as a conditioning factor in emotion and thought. Possible—but not easy, as the false starts among Layton's early poems testify. A consequence of the new wholeness, which some of the best of the later poems, Bacchanal, Latria, For Louise, age 17, and Love's Diffidence, identify with the old, classic pagan wholeness, is an escape from the shadow of repression and fear into the sunlight of a genuine freedom. For Mr. Layton this has made poetry possible and has not only enabled him to write good poems but to understand the nature of the poetic process itself. One of the most enlightening and successful of the pieces in The Cold Green Element is a fruit of this understanding; its title, indeed, is The Poetic Process. It is too long to quote here, but I recommend it to the reader who wants both an explicit statement and a concrete illustration of what Mr. Layton means by poetry and what he believes it can and should do.

There are other virtues in these poems that I haven't got around to naming yet: a surprising variety of seemingly incompatible images all made relevant and put to use; a power to generate fantasy out of reality without ever leaving reality behind; and a pervasive hard-to-define quality that shows itself most clearly in the phrasing, though it is in the structure of the best poems too: I can only name it elegance. (p. 590)

[The] best score of pieces in these four volumes signal the arrival of one of the finest poets of the modern revival in Canada. (p. 591)