A Alvarez's suggestion, in ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’ as in The Shaping Spirit before it, ‘that the techniques of Eliot and the rest never really took on in England because they were an essentially American concern: attempts to forge a distinctively American language for poetry’, could read as similarly applicable to the development of extremism. Plath, for all her English contexts, is ultimately more an American poet than she is an English one. It was only Hughes who appeared to manage to be English and extremist both—and, no confessional, even Hughes did not quite fit the mould.

By the time of the stocktaking of the ’60s in Edward Lucie-Smith's British Poetry since 1945, the effective successor to Kenneth Allott's Contemporary Verse, Lucie-Smith was questioning whether the British had taken any real notice of the American developments Alvarez had hoped they would learn from: ‘Robert Lowell has been the most praised poet of recent years and surely the least followed. “Confessional Verse” has scarcely managed to take root in English poetry’ Only the post-Poundian ‘Black Mountain’ poets had had a marked impact, their message being ‘stylistic’ not social, their techniques amenable to British poets.

In his Review debate with Alvarez, Donald Davie had stated:

It was to be the first of those, Pound, the poet least amenable to Alvarez, who was greatly to preoccupy Davie as critic and who was directly or indirectly to prove a model for much of the British Modernism of the 1960s. As the modernism of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and their new disciples in the Black Mountain School became the American verse to which young poets aspired, the desire to marry T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence became less urgent, even irrelevant, to them.