SOURCE: Trehearne, Brian. “‘Scanned and Scorned’: Freedom and Fame in Layton.” In Inside the Poem: Essays and Poems in Honour of Donald Stephens, edited by W. H. New, pp. 139-50. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Trehearne outlines the professional significance of “Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom” in Layton's career, highlighting the strategies and motives underlying his public pursuit of fame.

Irving Layton's “Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom” has received minimal explication in the three-and-a-half decades since its first appearance in The Canadian Forum, despite Layton's conviction that it “expresses better than any other poem of [his], what [his] whole life has been about” (Thomas, 68). Such a signature deserves thorough and various critical response, but the poem's riddling nature—freedom from what?—and deliberate refusal of rationality and structural unity have stymied Layton's readers, who offer only brief commentaries on the poem's obvious dialectics of creativity...