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This chapter considers the debate between A. Alvarez and Donald Davie published in the April/May 1962 issue of poetry magazine The Review. The debate aired some of the more significant thoughts and positions that Davie and Alvarez would develop in opposition to one another over the coming years, albeit in ways that are yet to be fully formed. At the same time, Alvarez and Davie agreed far more than one might expect. The debate also cast Alvarez as the practical man who would go beyond the fiddle of poetry, and Davie as the craftsman and aesthete. Yet it is Alvarez who asks far more of poetry. The remainder of the chapter describes how the debate between Davie and Alvarez differs from a more frequently iterated debate between the Movement and its opposition as well as the the high-profile discussions spawned by the debate.

This chapter focuses on literary journalist A. Alvarez and his views on the work of Thom Gunn. Alvarez, who was appointed poetry editor of the Observer in 1956, was primarily an academic through much of the 1950s. He studied and taught at Oxford and at Princeton, where he was a protégé of R. P. Blackmur. His university posts resulted in two critical books aimed largely at an academic audience: The Shaping Spirit (1958) about the poetry of English and American modernism, and The School of Donne (1960) on the metaphysical poets. Alvarez was initially an admirer of Gunn, who was as Donnean poet as he could have wished for. He would later change his mind, claiming that ‘apart from a handful of early poems, Gunn has never shown much interest in the style of exacerbated intensity that attracted his Cambridge contemporary, Ted Hughes’.

This chapter first considers A. Alvarez's assessment of the poetry and suicide of Sylvia Plath. It argues that Plath's suicide was an eventuality neither Alvarez's theories, nor Alvarez himself had predicted when he first admired Plath's work, but was something with which they had to come to terms. Alvarez's criticism changed in order to account for the unmistakably thanatopic themes in Plath's extraordinary last bursts of creativity and for their possible connection to the death of the author herself. The chapter then turns to Alvarez's extremism. For him, ‘extremism in the arts ends not so much in anarchy as in a kind of internal fascism by which the artist, to relieve his own boredom, becomes both torturer and tortured’. It is ‘ruthless, destructive, deeply self-involved, wildly self-gratifying’. By this Alvarez was advocating a stripe of Western art that, set beside his descriptions of the poetry of Eastern Europe, appears morbidly decadent.

This chapter presents a reading of A. Alvarez's The Savage God. The book is not chiefly a literary critical study, but is, in the words of its subtitle, ‘A Study of Suicide’. Moreover, while it contains considerable scholarship upon the subject of suicide, it is by no means an impersonal book. The portrait of Plath and her death at its beginning and the corresponding portrait of Alvarez and his own suicide attempt at its end would, with grim inappropriateness, these days be termed ‘life writing’. As Alvarez switches genres, biography becomes central and the poetry peripheral; Plath's significance to the book is as a case study of a suicide as much as a poet. The Savage God is then the decisive step towards the current position, where Plath criticism is overwhelmingly biographical criticism.

This chapter analyzes the meaning of the phrase ‘new seriousness’ which has been used to characterize The New Poetry. Although the phrase may sound urgent and understandable at first reading, it is situated within a complex web of debts and implications. In the 1960s, the increased emphasis on one sort of seriousness, that of personal sincerity, became important at a time when seriousness as sanctioned by custom, tradition, social norm, oath and obligation became less binding. Marriage, for instance, may have been an exemplary form of an old seriousness, but it was being newly questioned in the lives of the poets. A. Alvarez defines seriousness as ‘the poet's ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either conventional response or choking incoherence’.

This chapter considers the attacks against Alvarez's extremism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles Tomlinson's ‘Against Extremity’, from his 1969 collection The Way of the World, was particularly outspoken and unpleasant, referring to how ‘That girl’ who nearly took her own life before writing a book. Roy Fisher, a late modernist poet also declared: ‘The poets are dying because they have been told to die’. The fiercest and most comprehensive sally came from a bright young Scottish academic named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who inveighed against: the suicide merchants who say in effect, ‘no one can become a great poet unless he has at least tried killing himself’. The chapter goes on to discuss the similarities between Sylvia Plath and Forrest-Thomson, as well as the latter's poetry.

This chapter argues that the offsprings of The New Poetry have neither the nerve nor nous to have both the fierce partiality and the representativeness of Alvarez. Its Penguin successor, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Penguin Book of Contemporary British Verse, was ultimately a consolidation of a dominant taste more than an argument for a fresh one. The oft-stated complaint about the younger poets championed in their book is that their work was merely a continuation of the Movement by flashier device, but in truth a number of them are better seen as children of The New Poetry. Bloodaxe, a specialist poetry house, has for the last two decades taken upon itself to publish generation-defining anthologies. Its own The New Poetry borrowed Alvarez's title, if not his sense of purpose, but drew heavily on the format and ethos of Edward Lucie-Smith, if not his evaluative sense. The editors assembled work which often showed the influence of Paul Muldoon as well as the New York Poets, whose sense of play, even of fun, is much more clearly at odds with the spirits of Alvarez and of Conquest than are the influences of the Motion/Morison book.

This chapter begins with a consideration of the situation of Anglo-American poetry in the 1960s, asking why it would later become so receptive to Eastern European poetry. Here the key figure is A. Alvarez—editor of The New Poetry and editor of Eastern Europeans such as Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, and Miroslav Holub. We follow one of these, Holub, as he travels across the Iron Curtain from Czech poetry into English, noting the distortions and oversights necessary to such transmission. Strongly influenced by Beats such as Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, he is subsequently praised and promoted by figures who had no time for the Beats. Such were the subterranean passages that the Cold War created, as poets like Holub allowed anglophone poetry to outsource politics to Eastern Europe.