Mr. Irving Layton, to fit him quickly into the curriculum, should be brackted with, say, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley…. Canada provides him with a situation, not a tradition. He belongs to the anti-academic wing … of the American poetic generation, a little younger than Auden and Spender, whose right and center fill the better-capitalized quarterlies with cat's-cradle Meditations and grey flannel Suites: the generation that succeeded and should have inherited the achievements of Pound, Eliot, and Williams but could never grasp what they were up to. Mr. Layton's disdain for this poetic right and center is implicit; he will have us perceive that, though a wag, he is no Winters' tail. "If I'm not mistaken," he assures us on the front flap of A Laughter in the Mind, "the book is my best to date." [He is not mistaken. Sheer practice has lifted him to steady distinction.]… He...