Alvarez is one of the few critics .whose names will certainly be inscribed in the history of poetry. In the early 1960s, Mr. Alvarez championed a group of poets who were to become, in part thanks to his advocacy, the defining voices of their generation: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Ted Hughes, and especially Sylvia Plath. The poets Mr. Alvarez named “Extremists” were at war with what he derisively called “the gentility principle” in English poetry. Instead of the impersonal, allusive poems demanded by the New Criticism, the Extremists offered an art that issued directly from their own griefs and passions. In life and art, these poets were, in Lowell’s phrase, “freelancing out along the razor’s edge:” that so many of them couldn’t keep their balance, and died as suicides, only added to their glamour. In his landmark 1962 anthology “The New Poetry,” Mr. Alvarez was instrumental in bringing these poets to England; along with Ian Hamilton, he made their reputation there. And in his classic study “The Savage God,” Mr. Alvarez showed how suicide – in particular, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, whom he knew intimately – had become the master myth for his generation of writers.

Forty years later, Mr. Alvarez’s Extremists have passed into literary his tory, and the pitfalls of his approach to them can be seen more clearly. In fact, “The Writer’s Voice” (W.W. Norton, 128 pages, $21.95) – a short book containing three lectures Mr. Alvarez delivered at the New York Public Library in 2002 – can be read as an apology for and clarification of his critical achievement. In these wide-ranging, casually inviting discussions, Mr. Alvarez still defends authenticity as the central value in poetry; when he listens for “the writer’s voice,” he wants something beyond mere literary style, the unfakeable accent of essential honesty. But he is also concerned, especially in his final essay, to distinguish between this genuine voice, so arduously and rarely attained in poetry, and the mere bray of the ego, as heard in confessional and Beat poetry.

In this quest for authenticity, Mr. Alvarez shows himself a genuine heir of the Modernist movement in poetry – one of the last critics, perhaps, for whom Modernist assumptions and frames of reference are ingrained. The Extremist poets were in revolt against the austere impersonality of T.S. Eliot, who wrote that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Yet, as Mr. Alvarez insists, this was not a civil war but a family quarrel, or an Oedipal rebellion. Lowell, Berryman, and Plath “may have gone against Eliot’s strictures on the necessary impersonality of art, but they never betrayed him aesthetically or intellectually.” Perhaps it is best to speak of two generations of Modernism, early and late, which took different paths to the goal of authentic speech: “they wanted to make it new, not for the sake of novelty but because the style at hand wasn’t adequate to what they wanted to express.”

It is in the poets who came after the Extremists that Mr. Alvarez finds a real rupture with the values of Modernism. His sharpest criticism is reserved for confessional poets like Anne Sexton and Beats like Allen Ginsberg, who “believed it was their democratic duty, as well as their right, to display and sometimes act out their psychopathology in public.” The anti-intellectualism of such poets, and of their politically correct heirs, even leads Mr. Alvarez to invoke “the philistinism of the Soviet cultural commissars.” Their writing, he says, can be described with Ivan Klima’s term for corrupt Soviet language, “jerkish.” Our culture’s mistrust of art and of artistic excellence, Mr. Alvarez writes, “is as though the spirit of Stalin had risen again. … Jerkish and the codified stupidity that went with it continue to flourish. … socialist realism [has] been replaced by the equally sentimental and intolerant moral coercion of political correctness.”

It is doubtful whether this analogy really captures what has gone wrong with poetry in the last 20 years, and Mr. Alvarez’s vehemence is not accompanied by any close readings or analyses of particular recent poets. Indeed, while there has certainly been a “dumbing-down” of the culture of poetry, as Mr. Alvarez claims, the trendiest and most influential poets today present themselves as intellectual and even esoteric. Poets like Anne Carson and Jorie Graham can be seen as a dialectical development away from the anti-intellectualism of which Mr. Alvarez complains: their flaunted sophistication is seductive to a generation of readers who can’t tell the difference between spurious erudition and the real thing.

But if Mr. Alvarez’s critique of today’s poetry does not capture its particular perversities, his defense of the best Modernist tradition is still urgently needed. Mr. Alvarez must be one of the last critics who were thoroughly shaped by T.S. Eliot, and the reader familiar with Eliot’s essays will find many familiar quotations and examples in “The Writer’s Voice” – Donne, T.E. Hulme. Even Mr. Alvarez’s metaphor of “voice” seems reminiscent of Eliot’s notion of “auditory imagination”; and of course it was “The Waste Land” that demonstrated how much could be conveyed with just a chorus of voices, shorn of names and histories. Most important of all, in our loose poetic moment, Mr. Alvarez keeps faith with Eliot’s strict and demanding artistic standards: “The fascination” of poetry, he declares, “is with simply getting it right – where ‘it’ is a work with a life of its own, wholly independent of the artist and indifferent to him.”