[Irving Layton's] three principal gifts are a matchless ease and spontaneity of phrasing, an acute ear for line and stanza cadences, and the power to declare himself with indomitable authority on many topics. The authority derives from the most superb self-confidence in Canadian literature and from total faith in a handful of pseudo-ideas adapted from Nietzsche and Lawrence. Most of these views belong to the stock-in-trade of the anti-bourgeois writers from Sherwood Anderson to Alan Ginsberg. From this base Layton has been able to denounce a considerable proportion of his fellow humans as philistines, pharisees, puritans, and pedants.

The denunciatory Layton, bent upon uttering "a loud nix to the forces high-pressuring us into conformity or atomic dispersion,"… emerged in the fifties. His earlier poems—first gathered together in Here and Now … [and Now Is the Place and in the anthologies Other Canadians and Cerberus]—are mostly descriptive…. Layton in the forties was satisfied to act as the camera, recording with clarity and force scenes with which he had been familiar from childhood. His relation with this milieu, Montreal and Jewish, is mostly visual. He succeeds by his selection of details in communicating his loathing of economic inequity, racial intolerance, institutional religion, commercialized pleasures, and middle-class mores…. (p. 292)

During the fifties the "indestructible egotist" ("Trumpet Daffodil") took over, convinced that the enemies of creativity, "gentility, propriety, respectability … this genteel tradition preserved by clergymen, underdeveloped schoolmarms, university graduates, and right-thinking social workers," might be routed by the "barbaric yawp" of a Canadian Whitman. Layton's vision of Canadian society, however, had only minimal likeness to reality, as he would have realized if he in the least resembled Whitman in his way of looking at the people around him. Possibly, Layton was working out a strategy. Rather than endlessly adding poem to poem … he would find a way of integrating the elements of his career. He would devise a myth: the myth of the poet-outsider at odds with his society. On the one side, the poet, unconventional, unacademic, uninhibited, the darling of nature, the favourite son of Eros, one of the fine warty fellows; on the other side, a society mostly middle-class, repressed and repressive, hypocritical, dedicated to profits and status, bulwarked by an unjust economic system and an obsolete educational theory. Such a confrontation was of excellent ancestry; better, it was practicable and fructifying. It has several defects. It leads the poet into repeating stereotypes rather than taking a new look for himself. Even worse, it is an attitude that leads to satire and Layton has little talent as a satirist.

Nevertheless, the poet's admirers did not despair. Even in the little collections that the poet-outsider stance produced—[The Black Huntsmen, The Long Pea-Shooter, The Blue Propeller, and Music on a Kazoo] …—appeared poems of memorable dignity and insight. The day would come when the poet would be overwhelmed by his poems…. [The Improved Binoculars: Selected Poems], a rigorous garnering from ten years and eight books, made clear that at last Layton's evaluation of his poems was beginning to coincide with his critics'. The Improved Binoculars contains poems as good as any ever written in this country. The rhetoric had become less obtrusive, the sound of an authentic voice speaking of believable things could be clearly heard…. [In subsequent volumes] the poet completely submitted to his true genius—a genius not for satire or social criticism but for giving elegant and powerful expression to man's awareness of the intermingled beauty and horror of his condition. (pp. 292-93)