Alvarez, Alfred (1929- ) poet, novelist, critic

A. Alvarez was born to Bertie and Katie Levy Alvarez, members of a well-established Jewish family in London. In 1952 he graduated from Oxford with a degree in English. He spent the following years alternately as a researcher at Oxford, a research fellow at three different universities in America, and a freelance writer in London.

Although Alvarez started writing poetry as an undergraduate, he never produced a large body of verse. In 1961 a group of poems about his failed first marriage won the Vachel Lindsay Prize for Poetry from Poetry magazine. These poems, which include the titles “Love Affair,” “Waking,” and “The Survivor,” combine violent and natural images to describe feelings of alienation and separation. His last poetry collection, Autumn to Autumn, and Selected Poems, 1953-1976 (1978), contains a seven-sequence poem, “Autumn to Autumn,” that depicts a cycle of loss and renewal. The sense of renewal is evident in the sequence “Snow,” which concludes with the lines “Already the wind is turning, spring patrols the street, / The first buds stir under the snow on the hill.”

Although Alvarez’s emotionally intense poetry earned him a moderate level of recognition, he attained his greatest status as a critic. His first critical study, The Shaping Spirit (1958), analyzed modern English poetry, which he viewed as too academic and lacking in purity and personal strength. Alvarez continued this theme in his anthology The New Poetry (1962), in which he calls for English poets to “remain immune from the disease so often found in English culture: gentility.” He went on to establish himself as one of the foremost critics of poetry in the 1960s. Scholar Christopher Ricks gave him a limited accolade by opining that Alvarez is a good reviewer because “he can tell the difference between a good poem and a bad one. . . . You can usually trust his choices but not his arguments.”

Alvarez turned to novels in the 1970s, writing the highly regarded Hunt (1978), about a poker player who is unlucky in love; and Day of Atonement (1991), describing the London underworld. His nonfiction works include Feeding the Rat (1988), a biography of mountaineer Mo Anthoine; and The Savage God (1971), a widely read discussion of suicide. Critic Stephen Pile summarized Alvarez thus: “A bit of a poet and a bit less of a novelist, he is best known for . . . writing The Savage God, a celebrated study of that whole dark subject.”

Other Works by A. Alvarez:
- Night: An Exploration of Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams. New York: Norton, 1995.
- Where Did It All Go Right? An Autobiography. New York: Morrow, 1999.