In Alvarez's next book, The Savage God, the Ted Hughes of Crow flaps up to his place in the pantheon of extremist art to push Anne Sexton off her perch. Now, ‘the four leading English-language exponents of the style are Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.’ Extremist art is a Western counterpart to the outwardly directed ‘Totalitarian Art’ (the term is borrowed from Norman Mailer), which ‘tackles the historical situation frontally, more or less brutally, in order to create a human perspective for a dehumanizing process.’ Both are linked to suicide: Totalitarian Art ‘is as much an art of successful suicide, as Extremist Art is that of the attempt.’

The Savage God is not chiefly a literary critical study, but is, in the words of its subtitle, A Study of Suicide’. Moreover, while it contains considerable scholarship upon the subject of suicide, The Savage God is by no means an impersonal book. The portrait of Plath and her death at its beginning and the corresponding portrait of Alvarez and his own suicide attempt at its end would, with grim inappropriateness, these days be termed ‘life writing’. As Alvarez switches genres, biography becomes central and the poetry peripheral; Plath's significance to the book is as a case study of a suicide as much as a poet. The Savage God is then the decisive step towards the current position, where Plath criticism is overwhelmingly biographical criticism.

The account of the relationship between Plath's suicide and her art and the relationship between art and suicide in general is far more complex and nuanced in The Savage God than it is in Alvarez's earlier writings. Alvarez states that he felt that the suicide ‘was “a cry for help” which fatally misfired’ as well as being ‘a last desperate attempt to exorcise the death she had summoned up in her poems.’ In The Savage God Alvarez is also acute in pointing out the falsity of Plath's and others’ idealisations of death when in the face of death's reality. As is well noted by Susan B. Rosenbaum, Alvarez's description of Plath's corpse is carefully counterpoised against the perfected image of ‘Edge’: this a real body with ‘its ludicrous ruff’, the smell of apples as though they were beginning to rot. The Savage God is no naïve advocacy of suicide for artists.