- Born
- Died
- Birth nameAlfred Alvarez
- Poet, critic, and nonfiction writer Alfred Alvarez was born in London and educated at Oxford University. At age 28, Alvarez was the youngest person ever chosen by Princeton University to deliver the Christian Gauss lectures. He served as poetry critic and editor for The Observer from 1956 until 1966, where he was an early advocate of Sylvia Plath's poetry.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
- SpousesAnne Adams(1966 - August 23, 2019) (his death, 2 children)Ursula Barr(1956 - July 1961) (divorced, 1 child)
- His first wife was the granddaughter of Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, later wife of D. H. Lawrence.
- Both suicide and divorce are very public admissions of failure. But the difference is that you have to live through your divorce.
- [on his relationship with Sylvia Plath] My listening to her poems and encouraging her did nothing to alleviate her terrible loneliness and despair. She also needed someone to take care of her and that was not a role I could fill. I loved Sylvia in the way I love other friends - for her intelligence, her liveliness and the pleasure of her company, and for the disinterested passion for poetry which we shared. But my own life was a mess back then and I was neither willing nor tough enough to shoulder her despair. In the end, like everyone else, I let her down. All I can plead in my defence is that, since her death, I have done my best to show that what she wrote matters a great deal more than how she died.
- There was more life and liveliness and appetite in Plath writing about death than there is in the collected works of Philip Larkin writing about what a bitch it is to be alive.
- Bodily decrepitude is the end of wisdom, the end of curiosity, the end of energy, intellectual as well as physical, the end of appetite and delight. Bodily decrepitude is a prison ... with a boring and vindictive jailer who happens to be yourself.
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