That as recently as the 1960s and early 1970s English poetry could have been reckoned a matter of life and death will strike most readers now as a concept hard to credit. One of the first to look back in bemusement was Sean O'Brien, who, in a collection of essays published in 1998, breaks off from a discussion of Ted Hughes to point out:

Quick and accurate in his summary of the emotional style in question, O'Brien is too cautious—or too canny—to give it proper explanation or elaboration. That, however, is the task taken on by this book.

More generally, this is a study of the generation of poets born between 1929 and 1932 who succeeded and differed from the poets of the Movement. It concentrates on five poets: Thom Gunn (whose divided status as both a member of this group and of the Movement will be a subject of this study's early chapters), Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter, and on one influential editor and critic, A. Alvarez.

As O'Brien attests, those wishing to wrestle with the emotional style that succeeded the Movement need to come to grips with the prose of A. Alvarez. Alvarez was one of the first to identify the promise of Gunn, Hill, Hughes, Plath and Porter, and, more than the academic critics who followed him, Alvarez it was who helped establish their reputations, Plath's and Hughes's in particular. Whether as commentator, populariser or provocateur, Alvarez not only helped create the taste by which these poets were enjoyed, his prose affected how they would regard their own and each other's work.