The New Poetry

The New Poetry was a poetry anthology edited by Al Alvarez, published in 1962 and in a revised edition in 1966. It was greeted at the time as a significant review of the post-war scene in English poetry.

The introduction, written by Alvarez, is an essay called The New Poetry or Beyond the Gentility Principle. It originally appeared in a magazine called Commentary as a survey describing the state of modern poetry as Alvarez saw it. It made much play of contrasts between British/American poetry, old and then contemporary poetry, and for example Philip Larkin versus Ted Hughes.

The criteria for inclusion in The New Poetry were firstly the poet had to be British (which excluded Sylvia Plath from the first edition) and had to have not made their reputation before 1950 (this excluded the likes of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice) lastly the poets had to be ones that Alvarez liked. There were two exceptions to these guidelines: Alvarez included the long 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. Each poet was represented with a minimum of five poems. In the revised edition (1966) Alvarez relaxed these rules somewhat to allow Plath and Anne Sexton to be represented. In some senses the anthology can be seen as a reaction to Robert Conquest's New Lines anthology, which appeared a decade before.

The anthology included a very brief biographical note on each of the poets. The revised edition included three poems by Sylvia Plath that were previously unpublished.