Irving Layton

Irving Layton

Irving Layton (1912–2006) was a Romanian-born, Canadian poet. Early in his life, Layton faced anti-Semitism growing up in the St. Urbain Street neighborhood of Montreal. Politically outspoken, he was a familiar face on the CBC’s Fighting Words political talk show. Layton was a mentor to Leonard Cohen, who gave a eulogy at Layton’s funeral.

The Selected Poems Of Irving Layton

Poetry by Irving Layton

”What else are you going to say about a man whose work you wholeheartedly admire than that he is a good poet?" said William Carlos Williams over twenty years ago, introducing one of the thirty volumes of Layton’s poetry to appear in Canada in as many years. The Selected Poems of Irving Layton contains a retrospective of fifty poems with an introduction by the noted critic Hugh Kenner, and is intended to present Layton to an American audience that has been sadly unaware of the “poetry explosion” in Canada in recent years and his part in it.…
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His confidence was matched by his talent, which he used to fight uniformity and puritanism. He had a joy for carnality that could be equalled by his tender expressions of life’s more bittersweet fruits.
—The Guardian
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