The New Poetry

It originally appeared in a magazine called Commentary (not to be confused with the better-known New-York-based monthly of the same name) as a survey describing the state of modern poetry as Alvarez saw it.

The criteria for inclusion in The New Poetry were these: the poets had to be British (which excluded Sylvia Plath from the first edition); they needed to have been young enough to have made their reputations only after 1950 (this excluded the likes of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice); and they had to appeal to Alvarez himself.

There were two exceptions to the first and second of these guidelines: Alvarez included long well-established Americans Robert Lowell and John Berryman at the start of the anthology.

Alvarez concluded that Lowell and Berryman were the most influential figures on British poetry writing at that time, which justified their inclusion.

In the revised edition (1966) Alvarez relaxed these rules somewhat to allow Plath and yet another American poet, Anne Sexton, to be represented.