The New Poetry has had several offspring, yet no subsequent anthology has had the nerve or nous to have both the fierce partiality and the representativeness of Alvarez. Its Penguin successor, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion's Penguin Book of Contemporary British Verse, was certainly partial. Twenty years on, it honoured The New Poetry in the hope of burying it, declaring that it ‘has become a historical document’. The insistence that:

It is, according to Motion and Morrison, this very dislike of the obliquities of language and history that means Alvarez has no taste for the work of Seamus Heaney.

The attack on Alvarez is, as Randall Stevenson has pointed out, somewhat wide of the mark in the way it ignores Alvarez's emphasis on technical control. But it is not so wide of the mark as not to have something to it. Motion and Morrison may have been dubiously partisan in their choice of poets, but they were right to reflect a width of subject matter and mode of address, an interest in narrative not countenanced by Alvarez's programme. Yet it could also be observed that Heaney and the Belfast poets were finding a fraught external correlative to their more intimate concerns no less charged than was the geopolitics of 1962. And if seriousness of subject matter was a key ingredient of worthwhile poetry, the Northern Irish poets certainly had that.

While they may have differentiated their poets from Alvarez and from extremism, Motion/Morrison compiled an anthology that was ultimately a consolidation of a dominant taste more than an argument for a fresh one. The oft-stated complaint about the younger poets championed in their book is that their work was merely a continuation of the Movement by flashier device, but in truth a number of them are better seen as children of The New Poetry. The direct connections are there: Anne Stevenson was Plath's official biographer and for some years the partner of Philip Hobsbaum; the Lowell-influenced Hugo Williams was one of Ian Hamilton's Review poets.