Al Alvarez Quotes

“The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.”

Al Alvarez

Page 262.
The Savage God (1971)

“His face was blue, on his fingers
Flecks of green. 'This is my father',
I thought.”

Al Alvarez

Poem Mourning and Melancholia.

“In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.”

Al Alvarez

Page 25.
The Savage God (1971)

“Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.”

Al Alvarez

Page 254.
The Savage God (1971)

“Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.”

Al Alvarez

Page 251.
The Savage God (1971)