If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and his editorship of a Penguin series of modern European poetry in translation, made him at least as important to poetry-readers as Kenneth Tynan was to theatre-goers. Latterly, most of his work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books (where he was one of the founding contributors), but in the 1950s and 1960s he was everywhere, including on radio programmes like The Critics. His brisk, chortling opinions were so persuasive to his interlocutors, as well as his audiences, that ‘I agree with Alvarez’ became a catchphrase in my sixth form, to be quacked donnishly whenever one was at a loss for words. Whether or not I agree with Alvarez on any given point in this selection of his journalism, it has reminded me how much my generation’s views of writers and writing were shaped by his.
From today’s perspective, it may not seem to have taken much to recognise that the technical as well as emotional daring of some American and east European poets put them in a different league from most of their British counterparts. But it’s hard to exaggerate the literary insularity of 1950s England, compounded as it was by postwar resentment against American cultural power. After Oxford, Alvarez studied and taught in the States, though — as he related in his vivid and funny autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right? (1999) — it was another Englishman at Princeton, V. S. Pritchett, who first spotted his journalistic potential and brought him on.
One of Alvarez’s main arguments was that British poetry had suffered as a result of evading the challenges of Modernism and that even the most experimental writers, such as Auden and Dylan Thomas, still had to contend with what he called ‘the gentility principle’, particularly as manifested in ‘Movement’ poetry such as Philip Larkin’s.
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