Alfred Alvarez is better known as a critic and reviewer than as a poet. Anne Stevenson, for example, speaks of him as a critic who set his stamp "on a whole generation of poets who were coming into flower in the 1950s and 1960s." In this connection, he is best known for his controversial anthology The New Poetry (1962); in his polemical introduction, he argued that British poetry since World War II had suffered from an excess of gentility. For Alvarez the main attempts of modernism to "make it new" had been subverted by what he called a series of "negative feed-backs" to return British poetry to much the same state that it was in before World War I, and he identified three "negative feed-backs":

By the end of the thirties experimental verse was out and traditional forms, in a chic contemporary guise, were back in.... The log-rolling thirties...