8 contemporary poetry
form the poets refuse ‘to abandon a rational structure and compre-
hensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with
sensuous or emotional intent’ (p. xv).
Compare this gesture towards formal control with the introduc-
tion by Al Alvarez to The New Poetry in 1962. Alvarez’s opening
essay ‘The New Poetry’, subtitled ‘Or Beyond the Gentility
Principle’, considers that behavioural niceties and politeness has
strangled the evolution of British poetry. Alvarez comments that
‘Gentility is a belief that life is always more or less orderly, people
always more or less polite... controllable; that God is more or
less good.’^18 Passionately, he argues that our lives ‘are infl uenced
profoundly by forces which have nothing to do with gentility,
decency, or politeness’. Instead the poet may be faced with the so-
called advancement of the twentieth-century ‘forces of disintegra-
tion... their public faces are those of the two world wars, of the
concentration camps, of genocide, and the threat of nuclear war’
(p. 26 ). Poets appearing in the fi rst edition included Ted Hughes,
Geoffrey Hill, Robert Lowell and John Berryman; the revised
edition published in 1966 included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Lowell, Berryman, Sexton and Plath would later be grouped
together under the somewhat disparaging moniker of ‘confession-
alism’ or ‘confessional poetry’. Alvarez’s introduction also makes a
link between the evolution of psychoanalysis and history, or what
he acknowledges as ‘the forceable recognition of mass evil outside
us has developed precisely in parallel with psychoanalysis’ (p. 27 ).
As a general tendency, confessional poetry presented psychoan-
alytical concerns in addition to dramatising extreme states of being
and violence. The word ‘dramatising’ here is key; an early critical
trend had been to examine the work of these poets through their
biography, rather than view the extreme voices as a series of per-
sonae. One might consider, for example, the intrusion of popular
culture into the construction of selfhood exhibited in Plath’s
poems such as ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘The Applicant’. Or, there is
the teasing playfulness of Berryman’s The Dream Songs with its
evolving multi-persona Henry. ‘Dream Song 14 ’ comes to mind
with its statement: ‘Life, friends, is boring’ and the engaging retort
to his mother’s admonition ‘ “Ever to confess you’re bored / means
you have no / Inner Resources.’” Henry replies ‘I conclude now I