I an Hamilton's The Review was a high-minded, forward-thinking poetry magazine with a print run of about 1,000. Still, its first, April/May 1962, number was as much concerned with catching up with A. Alvarez as with pointing out the way ahead. The issue, which has an advert for all the new Penguin poetry books on its back cover, has as its longest piece a transcript of Alvarez in protracted debate with Donald Davie.

The previous year Davie had written an article for the Guardian calling for A New Aestheticism’ and proclaiming a reaction, not to Alvarez and like minds, but to those thinkers of the New Left who supposed ‘that the relation between the writer and his medium is subordinate and secondary to his relation with his society.’ As Davie upholds the importance of the medium, he is aware that things have moved on since the first days of the Movement. Davie notes the current fashion for the Beats, but concentrates on a far less coarse young group of poetry readers, claiming that ‘the rising generation’ do not ‘admit that a lively tenderness to experience can go along with inert or brutal dealings with language. They would sooner read Valéry's poems than Lawrence's, Charles Tomlinson's sooner than Philip Larkin's or Ted Hughes's.’

Charles Tomlinson had once been an undergraduate student of Davie. International in reading and aesthetic in outlook, Tomlinson took his bearings from French and American modernism and was increasingly to ally himself with William Carlos Williams and the objectivist tradition in American poetry. So Tomlinson did offer an English alternative to the Movement, and indeed to Ted Hughes, neo-Lawrentianism and expressionism. But at this stage it was not clear quite in which direction Tomlinson, still over-echoing the different manners of his modernist masters, was headed. It was certainly wishful to reckon the aesthetic austerities of Tomlinson were likely to gain an audience comparable to that excited by the more immediate attractions of Larkin or Hughes.