SOURCE: Trehearne, Brian. “A Partial Correspondence.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 47 (fall 1992): 82-89.

In the following review, Trehearne assesses the literary and biographical significance of Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978, in light of American poet Creeley's influence on Layton's artistic development.

The noteworthy documentary projects of Canadian literary scholars are too often parcelled out and undermined by the limited resources of the nation's academic publishers. A heartening exception is the exhaustively compiled and nearly complete works of A. M. Klein emerging from the University of Toronto Press during the past decade. A multivolume, complete collection of the letters of Irving Layton is similarly among the desiderata of our period in literary-critical history, but the letters are necessarily made public instead in a handful of independently published volumes such as Wild Gooseberries: The Selected Letters of Irving Layton (1989) and the present item of review, Irving...