The poetry boom of 1962 left Sylvia Plath off the invitation list. Plath's name makes the first edition of The New Poetry only in the apologies for absence, where Alvarez mentions Plath and Peter Porter as being among poets he has, ‘often regretfully’ had to exclude because although living in this country, [they] are not British.’ Since this was a book which made a point of including poets who were neither British nor resident in Britain, this may not have struck Plath as a wholly satisfactory explanation. The consequence of her exclusion meant anyone leafing on from Alvarez's introduction to see how writers were squaring up to the great challenges of the time would refer to the Americans Robert Lowell and John Berryman or to the prominent British poets gathered in the book, but not to the young poets from abroad who had made England their home. This may not have greatly worried Porter, who was being lifted from obscurity to prominence by Penguin Modern Poets, but Plath had not that consolation. Moreover, though Plath was, it seemed, too American to qualify for The New Poetry, her residency in England may well have been a factor in her surprising exclusion by Donald Hall from the forthcoming Contemporary American Poetry.

The only Penguin anthology that would number Plath among the new British poets and champion her work in 1962 was Kenneth Allott's Contemporary Verse, but here she seems a bastion against, rather than an exponent of, Alvarez-style new poetry. Allott finds in Plath's (earlier) work the influence of John Crow Ransom, which is ‘pleasant’ in one poem, ‘a shade too obtrusive’ in another. Plath is a writer whose ‘poetic gift’ is ‘civilized’, ‘without being at all weak or precious’. Though showing Allott generous in his praise of young writers when so moved, this praise is somewhat ineffectual: Plath sounds neither as new nor as exciting as does Hughes in Allott's attack on him, and her work appears to flourish well within the bounds of the gentility principle.