The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry 'Beyond the Gentility Principle'. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter.

William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The Alvarez Generation is an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a 'new seriousness' was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
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The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry 'Beyond the Gentility Principle'. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter.

William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The Alvarez Generation is an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a 'new seriousness' was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
43.99 In Stock
The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

by William Wootten
The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

by William Wootten

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Overview

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry 'Beyond the Gentility Principle'. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter.

William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The Alvarez Generation is an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a 'new seriousness' was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781781381632
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Publication date: 06/01/2015
Pages: 224
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

William Wootten is a literary journalist, writing for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. He is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol.

Table of Contents

Preface
Part I
1. Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry in the early 1950s
2. 'A Violent Time': Anti-Movement Poetry in the mid to late 1950s
3. In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn
4. Against Gentility
5. On Being Serious
6. Anthology Making
7. First Reactions: The Review Debate and the Initial Response to The New Poetry
Part II
8. Sylvia Plath
Part III
9. Going to Extremes
10. 'A Study of Suicide'
Part IV
11. 'Against Extremism'
12. Costing Seriousness
13. 'I Don't Like Dramatising Myself': anti-confessionalism in the later poetry of Thom Gunn
14. Birthday Letters
15. Geoffrey Hill's New Poetry
16. Children of The New Poetry
Index
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