Irving Peter Layton (1912-) né Israel Lazarovitch in Romania, poet, short-story writer, essayist, professor. Since the early 1940s, Layton has been recognized in Canada and abroad as a prolific, versatile, revolutionary and controversial poet of the "modern" school. He was one of a nucleus of young Montréal poets who believed they were effecting a revolution against insipid romanticism. His satire was generally directed against bourgeois dullness, and his famous love poems were erotically explicit. He published numerous volumes of poems of unusual range and versatility and a few of prose.
Layton has theorized that poetry should be "vital, intense, subtle and dramatic," and his work is ample proof of his description.