Reading Irving Layton on the first day of spring

On this first day of spring, 2021: enjoying re-reading Irving Layton's Waiting for the Messiah. Layton writes,

The importance of Montreal to me as a poet cannot be over stressed. The city gave me the confidence, the tools, the stimulating friendships and rivalries. It gave me a literary milieu comparable to what Paris had given the American expatriates, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In the early forties, it was in Montreal where Canada’s first sounds of poetry were heard.