Eleanor Spencer explores the topography of poetry in Britain during the 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that what we find is a series of what Al Alvarez saw as reactions to and rejections of that which came before. Plath emerges from a period which saw the Movement’s repudiation of the aesthetic and intellectual confusion of the New Romantics in favour of directness, communicability, and an incisive New Critical sensibility. Just six years later, however, Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry (1962) disavowed the ‘gentility’ of the Movement’s ‘academic-administrative verse’, calling instead for a poetry which ‘nakedly, and without evasion’ registered the ‘forces of disintegration’ in the post-WWII and Cold War era that threatened not only a familiar English way of life, but life itself.