Irving Layton

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.

When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.

The Holocaust is my symbol. If you read today's poets, you'd never know the kind of barbarous world we live in. Man forgets what a terrifying monster he can be. I want to keep reminding people how close they are to disaster.

[As a schoolboy] I naturally thought that in order to be a poet one had to be either English or dead, preferably both.
- All from Irving Layton, 1912 - 2006

About: Israel Pincu Lazarovitch was born at Targu Neamt, Romania on 12 March 1912. His family moved to Montreal in 1913 and adopted the name Layton. His outspoken iconoclasm started early, he was asked to leave high school. His first degree was in agriculture, but he taught English to immigrants until WW II when he enlisted but never was sent to Europe. As a socialist he was barred from the US, but opposed communism and supported the war in Vietnam. He achieved fame as Canada's best-known poet in the fifties, and gained an international following. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1995 and died at Montreal, Canada on Wednesday of this week (4 January 2006).