On Being Serious

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’.

Against Gentility

This chapter considers works emerging from the poetic movement which formed part of a much larger picture of progression from small pockets of anti-gentility in British society and culture in the 1950s to the much more pervasive societal shift of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentility was not simply repression by politeness, it was connected to the repressions of the culture at large: the emotional and social repression of ‘libido’ or ‘evil’, ‘two world wars’, ‘concentration camps’, ‘genocide’, ‘the threat of nuclear war’. A poet needs to confront ‘the fears and desires he does not wish to face’ and gentility serves to hide from this.

Against Extremism

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.

Afterword

The Afterword examines publications and disclosures made about the connection between A. Alvarez and Sylvia Plath since the first publication of The Alvarez Generation. Its own look at the biographical details of personal relationship between the two writers details the timing of their meetings and the poems Plath recited at them. The Afterword also weighs up the biographical evidence for a possible sexual liaison between Alvarez and Plath, including the testimony of Olwyn Hughes regarding Plath’s journals cited by Ted Hughes’s biographer Jonathan Bate, and settles the question by adding new biographical evidence of its own. The Afterword then reconsiders ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ in relation to questions of sex and sexual politics, and re-evaluates Alvarez’s presentations of possible connections between Plath’s poetry and her suicide.

First Reactions: The Review Debate and the Initial Response to The New Poetry

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.

‘I Don’t Like Dramatizing Myself’

This chapter considers the poetry of Thom Gunn. While discussing ‘The Gas Poker’ a poem from his last volume, 2000's Boss Cupid, Gunn remarked: ‘I don't like dramatizing myself. I don't want to be Sylvia Plath. The last person I want to be!’ The chapter examines the reasons behind this remark. It looks at ‘Expression’, a poem from his 1982 collection The Passages of Joy, suggesting that the lack of expression emanating from its mother and son has its correlative in the lack of direct expression in Gunn's verse of his relationship to his mother and to the manner of her death. Following a surfeit of histrionic emotionalism and suicide in early life, Gunn had little cause to seek it out in art and sought a mentor who would make poetic theory and practice a bulwark against them.

Birthday Letters

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.

Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry

This chapter examines the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, a poet of the New Poetry generation who has over the last two decades been more active and in some ways more extremist than he ever was before. From 1996's Canaan on, the costive impersonality of Hill's earlier work has been shredded to reveal a poet more nakedly rivalrous and rancorous, more overtly ungenteel, more flagrantly assertive of bad taste and distaste than he ever was before. Hill has not been reckless with the details of his intimates, but, making his age, his depression, and its medication the subject for verse, he is much closer to Plath's domain than he once was. Indeed, in his poetry, the ethical problem of relating to portrayals of human suffering in the world and in history has taken on a much more personal colouring.

Costing Seriousness

This chapter analyzes the language of seriousness in the poetry of Peter Porter. For instance, ‘Seahorses’, from 1969's A Porter Folio, a poem in which Porter recalls finding seahorses upon the beach in the Australia of his childhood, includes the thought of how sometimes they were ‘like a suicide wreathed in fine /Sea ivy and bleached sea roses /One stiff but apologetic in its trance’. The poem ‘Seaside Resort’, from 1972's Preaching to the Converted, half mourns the passing of the Victorian age and the age of seriousness that succeeded an age of faith while Porter's collection The Cost of Seriousness brings questions of seriousness and its cost to a head.

Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry in the Early 1950s

This chapter focuses on the student poets of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1950s who rose to prominence in the early 1960s. The works of these student poets, among them A. Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Jenny Joseph, J. E. M. [Edward] Lucie-Smith, George Macbeth, and Anthony Thwaite, were published in Oxford Poetry, the most significant poetry publishing venture in Oxford or Cambridge in the 1950s. Oxford Poetry was established in 1952 by Michael Shanks, then President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, who linked up with the painter and printer Oscar Mellor. The pamphlets the press turned out were slim — five or six poems — but they were well produced, and they were keenly read, as was Oxford Poetry.