The New Poetry

📅 1962 ✏️ Al Alvarez 📖 Penguin Books 📚 Revised and expanded 1966 (including Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus')

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The New Poetry (1962), edited by poet and critic Al Alvarez for Penguin Books, was famous for its combative introduction attacking the 'gentility principle' in British poetry and championing a more extreme, emotionally exposed, and psychologically daring poetic mode. The revised 1966 edition notably included Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' poems published after her death that would become defining works of the confessional style Alvarez had called for.

Overview

Published as a Penguin paperback in 1962, The New Poetry was edited by Al Alvarez, a poet, critic, and the influential poetry editor of The Observer. The anthology was designed to correct what Alvarez saw as the dominant failing of post-war British poetry: a pervasive "gentility" that avoided emotional extremity, psychological risk, and genuine formal innovation in favour of well-mannered, ironic verse. Alvarez argued for a poetry of existential confrontation, influenced by modern European and American models, and he built the anthology to demonstrate what that poetry looked like.

Scope and Contents

The original 1962 edition featured British poets who had established their reputations after 1950: Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, R. S. Thomas, and others, alongside two American poets — Robert Lowell and John Berryman — whom Alvarez considered essential models for the new British poetry. The introduction positioned Hughes's violent, mythic poems as the British answer to American confessional and European existentialist modes, and contrasted them sharply with the more urbane, domesticated verse Alvarez regarded as deadening British poetry.

The 1966 Edition and Plath's Inclusion

The revised 1966 edition is historically famous for including Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" — poems from the Ariel manuscript that had been published posthumously in 1965. Alvarez had corresponded with Plath in her last months, and her poetry, with its unflinching confrontation with pain, rage, and psychological extremity, exemplified everything his 1962 introduction had called for. The inclusion of Plath — not present in the 1962 edition — made the revised anthology a landmark in the emergence of confessional poetry as an Anglo-American movement.

Historical Significance

Few anthology introductions have been as consequential as Alvarez's "The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle." The essay became a touchstone in British literary criticism, and the anthology itself was credited with reshaping British poetic taste in the 1960s — pushing it toward greater formal daring and emotional exposure. Alvarez's polemic against gentility was one of the most influential statements about what British poetry should be since Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Criticism

The anthology's stark binary — genteel vs. extreme, British vs. American — has been criticised as reductive. Many poets and critics argued that Alvarez's framework unfairly dismissed accomplished British poets who did not fit his model of intensity, and that his privileging of American confessionalism created a distorted picture of British poetry's real breadth. Later assessments have noted that several poets included as exemplars of "toughness" produced more complex and varied work than Alvarez's framework could accommodate.

Related Anthologies

The Faber Book of Modern Verse, Contemporary American Poetry

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The New Poetry?

The New Poetry (1962), edited by Al Alvarez for Penguin, is a landmark anthology famous for its combative introduction attacking the 'gentility principle' in British poetry and arguing for a more psychologically daring, emotionally exposed poetic mode. The revised 1966 edition notably included Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus.'

Why was Alvarez's introduction important?

His essay 'The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle' became a touchstone in British literary criticism, credited with reshaping British poetry toward greater formal daring and emotional exposure. It is one of the most consequential anthology introductions ever published.

What did the 1966 edition add?

The 1966 revised edition added Sylvia Plath, whose posthumously published 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' exemplified the extreme, confrontational poetry Alvarez had called for in his original introduction. Her inclusion made the anthology a landmark in the confessional poetry movement.

Last updated: 2026-07-01