At the time of publication of the 1966 edition of The New Poetry, the preponderance and success of A. Alvarez's taste were lapping their high watermark. The cover, a photographic reproduction of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist painting ‘Convergence’, now looked an ideal match for the vision set out in the book's introduction. But, in comparison to four years before, so too did a much larger proportion of the book's poems. Peter Porter was included, as were George MacBeth and David Wevill; so too were Jon Silkin, whose ‘Poem for my Son’ is as raw an elegy as one is likely to encounter, and Ian Hamilton, whose pared down, intense and pain-filled lyricism owes something to A. Alvarez's friendship and influence. Most importantly, the new edition contained the later poems of Sylvia Plath. These, like the poems of Anne Sexton, were placed in the admonitory American section of the book, and, above all others poems included, appeared to vindicate the call of its introduction. Yet if it was Plath's work that best justified Alvarez's advocacy of a way of writing and its possibilities, her suicide could appear to signify their dangers. How the excellence of the former does or does not connect to the tragedy of the latter exercised critics from the moment Plath's death and her last poems became known, and well before the Plath biography industry made the link between life and art seem inevitable.

In his BBC tribute to Plath, later published as an essay in Ian Hamilton's Review, Alvarez was the first critic to assess Plath properly, and his judgments remain defining and some of the best that have been written. Still, the end of the essay is one to cause qualms:

What can such a statement mean? If the poems are inseparable from the suicide of their poet, is suicide not cowardice, as it is sometimes portrayed, but bravery? And does the poetry partake of that bravery?