The contributors list to Oxford Poetry of 1953, edited by Donald Hall and Geoffrey Hill, reads like that of a broad-minded poetry magazine of the 1960s. Names on the list include, alongside those of Hill and Hall themselves: A. Alvarez, Alan Brownjohn, Jenny Joseph, J.E.M. [Edward] Lucie-Smith, George Macbeth and Anthony Thwaite. Oxford Poetry and publications like it bear out a general truth: most of the English poets who came to prominence the early 1960s had, like their editors and critics, been the student poets of the Oxford and Cambridge of a decade before.

Oxford Poetry was a product of the Fantasy Press. This, the most significant poetry publishing venture in Oxford or Cambridge in the 1950s, was started in 1952 after Michael Shanks, then President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, linked up with the painter and printer Oscar Mellor. The pamphlets the press turned out were slim—five or six poems—but they were well produced, and they were keenly read, as was Oxford Poetry. Michael Shanks's successor was Donald Hall, an American who had been a friend and follower of the poet Richard Wilbur at Harvard. The recipient of a Henry Fellowship, Hall came to Christ Church, Oxford in 1951 and quickly became friendly with Oxford's nascent literary critics—Hall recalls how ‘George Steiner, Al Alvarez, and I were a little troika’. Already a graduate and slightly older than those now around him, Hall offered the young English poets of Oxford a mentoring service. He also introduced them to the American verse of the time. Hall and Mellor were to produce pamphlets 10–18 of the Fantasy series, pamphlets including those of Geoffrey Hill (11), Adrienne Rich (12), A. Alvarez (15) in 1952, the Cambridge import Thom Gunn (16) and the Oxfordian Anthony Thwaite (17) in 1953. Hall's successor, Oxford undergraduate George MacBeth, brought in older poets associated with what was starting to be termed the Movement, publishing Donald Davie (19), Philip Larkin (21) and Kingsley Amis (22) in 1954. It was the Fantasy Press too which in that year published the first edition of Thom Gunn's Fighting Terms.