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Al Alvarez
Alvarez in 2006
Born	August 5, 1929 (1929-08-05) (age 80) London
Occupation	poet, author, critic
Nationality	British
Writing period	1956–

Al Alvarez (born London, August 5, 1929) is an English poet, writer and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez.

Born Alfred Alvarez, he was educated at Oundle School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he took a First in English. After teaching briefly in Oxford and the USA, he became a fulltime writer in his late twenties. From 1956 to 1966, he was the poetry editor and critic for The Observer, where he introduced British readers to John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Zbigniew Herbert, and Miroslav Holub.

Alvarez is the author of many non-fiction books. He is best known for his study of suicide, The Savage God, which gained added resonance from his friendship with Sylvia Plath. He has also written on divorce (Life After Marriage), dreams (Night), and the oil industry (Offshore), as well as his hobbies of poker (The Biggest Game In Town) and mountaineering (Feeding the Rat, a profile of his frequent climbing partner Mo Anthoine). His 1999 autobiography is entitled Where Did It All Go Right?

His 1962 poetry anthology The New Poetry was hailed at the time as a fresh departure. It championed the American style, in relation to the perceived excessive 'gentility' of British poetry of the time.

Alvarez was portrayed by Jared Harris in the 2003 film Sylvia, which chronicles the troubled relationship between Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes.

Selected works

• The Shaping Spirit (1958)
• The School of Donne (1961)
• The New Poetry' (1962)
• Under Pressure (1965)
• Beyond All This Fiddle (1968)
• The Savage God (1972)
• Samuel Beckett (1973)
• Hers (1974)
• Hunt (1979)
• Life After Marriage (1982)
• The Biggest Game in Town (1983)
• Feeding the Rat (1989)
• Day of Atonement (1991)
• Night (1995)
• Where Did It All Go Right? (1999)
• Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats (2001)
• New & Selected Poems (2002)
• The Writer's Voice (2005)
• Risky Business (2007)

See also

• Confessional poetry
• List of British Jews

External links

• Book Review of 'The Biggest Game In Town'

From Wikiquote

Alfred Alvarez (born 1929-08-05) is an English poet, literary critic and writer of non-fiction on many subjects. His 1962 anthology The New Poetry attracted a new public to contemporary American poetry, as well as British poets of The Movement and The Group.

Sourced

• His face was blue, on his fingers
  Flecks of green. 'This is my father',
  I thought.
  • Poem Mourning and Melancholia

The Savage God (1971)

Quotations are cited from the 1972 Random House edition.

• In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.
  • Page 25.

• Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.
  • Page 251.

• Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.
  • Page 254.

• The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.
  • Page 262.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Al Alvarez