I must confess that for the past three or four years I've been unable to read anything by Irving Layton, at any rate not without a certain feeling of sour taste and acid indigestion. Whether this comes of prejudice as Layton himself tells me, or of something in the poetry, I cannot be sure. For years I was his champion against the deaf and myopic critics in Canada, insisting that he was a vigorous realistic poet who deserved recognition. Today everyone is ready to admit that Layton is much better than the critics gave credit for in 1950…. In fact he is universally hailed as "the most powerful Canadian poet", and no one seems inclined to dissent from the chorus of unanimous praise. Layton, it seems, has graduated from Canada's most neglected poet to the most over-rated poet anywhere. (p. 136)

I think still that Layton is every bit as good a poet, when he is good, as I argued that he was … a few years ago. But he is not what most of his critics now make him out to be. (p. 137)

Not having read the poetry for some years, I cannot be very specific. But most of [A Red Carpet for the Sun] I know from way back. Turn to page 111 and read:

               Adults are children merely
               with a larger vocabulary.

The position of that merely makes one's nose cringe. By getting stuck in an unidiomatic position the word has ambiguous reference, forward and backward, without any valuable increment on either side. The second line, in any case, as a pretended witty stroke, comes down like a club. But go on:

               my fears are no different from
               when I was a six-year son.

This is about the nadir of un-English idiom: mere illiteracy. I have always recoiled at this kind of thing in Klein, and in Layton. The fatal flaw of much of their poetry. And most damaging when, for lack of humility, it goes with bluster and self-conceit.

                  This I my wife abuses;
                  and others, my principal:
                  who lives by daily ruses
                  a desperate animal

The barbarism here is really troglodytic. Old Gurth seems to be learning to speak, and to punctuate. He's simply not found a way to express the idea of the first line. The colon makes no more sense than the digression into a personal affront (the typical contempt for people that balances Layton's abundant love).

                  Heard today how quietly
                  the fluent Vishinsky died:

The lack of stop after the preceding verse may suggest that the "principal" (of the school) heard this news. Actually it is the poet who does—then why the ambiguity?

            If he could not out-talk Death
            what chance have I, so tongue tied?

Perhaps the one truth in the poem: Layton is simply tongue-tied, incoherent here. But the rhythm of that last bit makes one bend over with colic. Only Layton could write so tone-deaf a line and still believe it proved him a mighty maker of harmonies. (pp. 137-38)

I have gone through the entire poem—admittedly a bad one—an unfair choice—because Layton has been universally praised as a craftsman, and craftsmanship is at least one thing you can demonstrate or disprove. These three quatrains are the worst by a poet of any reputation written in the twentieth century. Craftsmanship in poetry is a gift of nature, requiring development certainly, and secondary to other things, but nevertheless a gift. Auden is a great craftsman; so is Cummings. Layton's gift is a very minor one in that direction. He cannot "do anything he wants to", as Williams opined, but only his own restricted expressionist kind of thing. (p. 138)

[Layton] has done some very good things, especially in the decade before 1953…. But he is not "a major voice" … nor "the most powerful Canadian poet" … nor "the generation's finest". I'm sure that some of these adjectives make even Layton squirm.

In many of Layton's poems we have a misguided storyteller (e.g. in "The Dwarf", "Cain", "Paging Mr. Superman", "The Bull Calf", "The Comic Element") that gives the poems a great initial interest. In others, there is a macabre sense of humour that again draws the reader, to a point. Then there is the great philosophical bombast (e.g. "The Birth of Tragedy"), the Nietzscheanism, the world-revolutionary nihilism. The ego that makes shuddering confessions ("A Roman Jew to Ovid", "E.P. on his Critics" …) is of course fascinating also. One could go on to list the kinds of sensationalism—for I believe it is sensationalism—that Layton unconsciously and habitually exploits.

The source of this outpouring of effects seems to be a hunger for magnitude, greatness, desire to be acclaimed—that last infirmity—in this case the first and last. (pp. 138-39)

As it is, most of his poems are a series of monstrous masks and disguises. The motivation seems, of late years, increasingly impure, the grovelling state, self-pity, sultry compassion, alternating in the most transparent poses. The openly self-assertive manner—"my surpassing art", "like genius, irrefutable"—is not always explicit. A colleague of mine a few years ago told me after reading Layton: "He obviously thinks he is a genius; and of course he isn't." Layton's development has moved from a naive truculence, with its wining qualities of young protest, hatred of injustice, defence of life, to a stentorian rhetoric enveloping a mass of contradictions from Nietzsche, Marx, Lawrence, Yeats and Blake…. Now a member of the "School of Frye" …, his poetry is an imposing charnel-house of interlocking symbols and orotund sentences. Frankly, I miss the old socialist, social realist, and satirist of sexlessness and complacency. (p. 139)

In short, Irving Layton seems to me to be too much the ego-builder, at this stage, to be a satisfactory poet. As a celebrity at present, he is a purely typical Canadian product, a blow-up of our national inferiority complex. (p. 140)