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 <em>The New Poetry</em>, take poetry 'Beyond the Gentility Principle'. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter.<br><br>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.<em>The Alvarez Generation </em>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.