Irving Layton Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Munro Beattie

Critical Essay by Munro Beattie

[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...
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