Though A. Alvarez's appointment as poetry editor of the Observer in 1956 would quickly make him best known as a literary journalist, through much of the 1950s he was primarily an academic. Alvarez studied and taught at Oxford and at Princeton, where he was a protégé of R.P. Blackmur, and his university posts resulted in two critical books aimed largely at an academic audience: 1958's The Shaping Spirit, which is about the poetry of English and American modernism, and 1960's The School of Donne, which is on the metaphysical poets.

The Shaping Spirit is somewhere between being a work of Movement criticism (John Wain is a notable influence) and a reaction against it. On the one hand, Alvarez offers up the opinion that ‘The experimental trappings of modernism are a minor issue in English verse. It is largely an American importation and an American need.’ On the other, as he writes of Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, Auden, Empson, Crane and Stevens, there is no doubting the pull of American modernism for the young Alvarez, nor his interest in seeing, in Yeats and Lawrence in particular, versions of a modern poetic intelligence beyond the American.

The chapter on D.H. Lawrence is the most telling. Here innovation and emotion become one: ‘The whole of Lawrence's power and originality as a poet depends on the way he keeps close to his feelings. That is why he had to rid himself of conventional forms.’ Here too Alvarez falls out of temper with the poetry of the 1950s. Criticism of Lawrence's ‘carelessness’ as a poet rouses the response: