New Poetry

by Al Álvarez

A poetry anthology including multiple works by each of these authors.

Kingsley Amis
John Berryman
Arthur Boyars
Iain Crichton Smith
Donald Davie
D. J. Enright
John Fuller
Thom Gunn
Michael Hamburger
Ian Hamilton

Geoffrey Hill
David Holbrook
Ted Hughes
Philip Larkin
Robert Lowell
George MacBeth
Norman MacCaig
Christopher Middleton
Sylvia Plath

Peter Porter
Peter Redgrove
Anne Sexton
Jon Silkin
R. S. Thomas
Charles Tomlinson
John Wain
Ted Walker
David Wevill

Genres: Poetry, Collections

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Alfred Alvarez was an English poet, novelist, essayist and critic who published under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.

Reviews

[Esther]

Seen as quite a watershed moment in poetry, the poets Alvarez was promoting during the early 1960s. This has big names, Hughes, Plath, Larkin, Sexton, Lowell and some others new to me, who have not stood the test of time. Joy to pick up this Penguin edition, from 1962 (price 4’6), with of its time abstract expressionist cover from an Oxfam bookshop for 99p. What a treasure.

[David]

Alvarez' "New Poetry" helped me understand how to comprehend poetry better and how to appreciate it. I think this book is still timely for those still searching as lovers of the art of poetry. Poetry in the 21st Century seems to have become a smokey corner filled with dandified poseurs and sorrowful ragamuffins who have established themselves as avatars of poetic expression.

Technology is a poetry killer but a boon to publishing. No, I'm wrong. Technology kills young poets, rather, if not youth altogether. The emphasis now is on technical competence to keep the machinery of humanity running as efficiently as possible instead of delving into what humanity feels.

Eventually, the latter--the delving within, must happen, because one cannot exist without the other. Yet, I feel that poetry is in a depression presently as if in an abandoned warehouse, and I fear that we'll be so busy pressing buttons and pulling levers a la Charlie Chaplin that we won't see the stack of heavy debris teetering above us before it collapses.

[Belle]

A couple very nice poems, especially liked At Porthcothan by Christopher Middleton and Early Morning Feed by Peter Redgrove

[M.B.]

This was one of those landmark books for me - I bought it second-hand when I was about 16 or 17 and was introduced for the first time to Plath and other poets. Still remember the cover vividly - a Pollock print, and rubbed corners.

[Rebekah]

Some excellent poems in here despite the gross and glaring omission of women. Al Alvarez is on my blacklist. How you can spend pages and pages on an introduction raging against gentility in poetry and then sidelining Plath and Sexton, and not even mentioning any other contemporaries is beyond me.

[Thomas]

An important anthology with some fantastic poems, but severely (but unsurprisingly) lacking in diversity.

[David Warner]

Over sixty years on from first publication, and this anthology of postwar Anglophone poetry remains, with its justly famous cri-de-couer introduction, a valuable collection of mostly first-rate verse, in which Larkin, Plath, and Hughes stand out for their technique, content, and artistic imagination, with Geoffrey Hill, despite his often de trop intellectualism, not far behind.
Al Álvarez makes a strong case for the importance and distinctiveness of this New Poetry, which after the conformity of the 'forties, moves on from the technical, but not particularly profound or morally deep, excellence of Auden to a more confessional, yet not overtly empirical, style that while rejecting the cosy, conformism of the Betjeman school still maintains a firm foothold in a recognisably English tradition.
However, over this new verse of the 1950s and 1960s there is still cast the enormous shadow of T.S. Eliot - confronted but not vanquished by Álvarez - and his objectivism, from which none of these poets, despite their skill, can escape, being ultimately limited by their subjectivity, so that while Eliot can in 'The Waste Land' capture the nature of an age beyond its temporal-spacial particularism and ideate the great themes of life as an other to be known transcendentally, all these writers, Sylvia Plath the doyenne, can only approach similar matter through their perception and personal, and personalised, experience, with the result that life and death, war and genocide, become concepts of mind to be perceived personally and not objective phenomena to be understood cognitively and known noumenally through the great literary art that, as with Eliot, casts them as realities both outside and within mind, and above our own experiences.
As such, the New Poetry, could never attain the greatness of the canonical masters, Eliot being the last, but at times, and within its own subjectivity, it does, as with 'Daddy' and 'The Whitsun Weddings', approach as near as its form permits, but only when composed, as here, by the most skilled of poets.

[Mahmoud Keshk]

Most of the poetry here is banal and dull

[Bryce Furlong]

3.5

[Michael Vawser]

Reprint 1967

[Alan]

Bloody brilliant selection - Hughes, Plath, Larkin, R S Thomas, Silkin, the lot - read in 1972/3 for my A levels. Still have the heavily annotated book.

[Lorraine]

read this mainly for Alvarez's introduction. He's a bit hard on the poor guys isn't he? I am not sure I agree with him too.

[BookLovingLady (deceased Jan. 25, 2023...)]

I never read my poetry books from cover to cover, I just keep picking out bits and pieces... It's an ongoing process.

[Dominic]

loved some of the selected poems, more so the Americans on the whole. However I thought Alvarez's introduction was a little strained after having read the selection.