Irving Layton: Canadian Bully

[Ezekiel 4:9]

In spite of his pretence of being a prophet, the Canadian poet Irving Layton is really nothing more than a vociferous narcissist with nothing to say. This contemptible poem sums up his poetic creed and further demonstrates his utter inability to "make things happen" at the formal and stylistic level of expression.


WHOM I WRITE FOR

(text removed at request of Layton estate/publisher)


This is a worthless poem, essentially because it fails to realize what it asserts. The subject is Layton's intense desire to be heard (regardless of what he might have to say) and his claim to communicative potency. The violent imagery is meant to dramatize this idea in order to force the reader feel the poet's power; however, the diction is attenuated by stock phrases, syntactical predictability, and an cowardly absence of imaginative risk-taking. The poem asserts power but expresses resentment and impotence. An authentically forceful or “violent” poem would perhaps need to launch a sort of blitzkrieg on the conventional use of language. Compared to Stevens’s “Poetry is a Destructive Force,” to take just one of many superior examples, Layton’s sarcastic poetic mission statement is no more impressive than the boasting of some adolescent, foulmouth bully. “Whom I Write For,” like most of Layton’s poems, is nothing more than a bluff by a bully of a poet.

[OrphanPip]

Well Layton was a prolific writer, so its a bit silly to expect all of his poetry to be good.

The fact of the matter though is that Layton was a respected poet, he was praised by William Carlos William, Northrop Frye, Al Purdy, and pretty has the strongest claim to being Canada's most influential post-war poet. He was also nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I ran over and got my selected poems, and Layton didn't even chose to include this poem amongst the 300+ in the collection. It's also interesting that you would choose to compare him to Wallace Stevens, a poet very much at odds aesthetically with Layton. Whether you think Layton's idea of poetry is narcissistic (it was typical of the kind of individualist drive in poetry during the 60s and 70s), his mission was to bring an ugliness to poetry. Layton believed that poetry should reflect the realities, and that the realities are not beautiful.

From Layton's forward to "Balls for a One-Armed Juggler":

"Turn to the novel or the play, and the frightful hideousness of contemporary man is their constant theme and preoccupation. Man, without a soul; man, roboticized; man, tortured, humiliated, and crucified; man, driven into slave camps and death factories by devils and perverts; man, the dirtiest predator of all. The novelist: Kafka, Dotoievsky, Lawrence, Faulkner; the playwrights: Beckett, Genet, Ionesco - almost every page of theirs is a condemnation and a warning. The poets? Pound's mid-Western blat about Social Credit? Eliot's weary Anglicanism? Yeat's fairy-tale Byzantium? In these vicious, revolutionary times? Don't make me laugh. Frost's jaunty pastoralism? Auden's sensationalist mishmash of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Christianity? What a sour, boring joke!"

In this sense Layton is a follower of William Carlos Williams, and of his more direct mentor the Canadian poet A.M. Klein (who sadly had a mental breakdown after the war). That is what Layton is expressing in this poem, and he does it quite clearly. He is actually, I would argue, better at this poetic mission than his contemporaries like Ginsberg, who becomes bland a repetitive after a shining beginning, or Plath, who is even more self-obsessed than Layton.

Now is Layton a prophet? Obviously not, he's self-aggrandizing and had an exceptionally elevated opinion of himself and his position as an artist. 30 years ago it probably would have been fair to say Layton was the most highly regarded Canadian poet, now the celebrity mystique has faded with the years, most Canadians won't recognize Layton as a figure who used to regularly appear on the CBC ranting and raving about the Anglo-Saxon establishment. However, critical opinion has still held up decently well, and Layton is recognized by the majority of critics as a talented and important poet. Even if he was a jackass.

[Ezekiel 4:9]

I hear what you're saying, but my complaint is based on what I jugde to be a consistent weakness in his poetry at the level of formal realization. I have taken an extreme example, though. I agree with criticism of my comparison of him with Wallace Stevens--I suppose he is writing in a completely different aesthetic medium--but again, I'm talking about success at formal realization. By the way, Stevens did have an interlude as a realist poet of war.