History

The editors would like to thank Graham Nelson (editor 1998-2000) for the exhaustive work that prepared the way for this section of the site, which includes information on every issue and contributor since OP's inception.

Oxford Poetry was founded in 1910-13 by Basil Blackwell and, despite intermissions, has been published mostly continuously since then. These web pages (browse the navigation pane on the right) are a consolidated index, with alphabetical entries on contributors from Harold Acton to Lotte Zurndorfer, and contents pages and bibliographic data for each issue. Book reviews are cross-referenced and appear under both reviewer and author of the book being reviewed (even if, like Ted Hughes, he or she has never been a contributor). Prose pieces (reviews, interviews, etc.) are italicised.

Very brief biographical notes are included, though as yet only for contributors 1910-52. The notation (OCEL) means that the contributor has a fuller biography in the Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed. Margaret Drabble, fifth edition revised 1995); (OCTCP) denotes an entry in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (ed. Ian Hamilton, 1996). The editors welcome comments, and would especially welcome help from anyone who might confirm or deny the non-existence of OP 1958.

Until the early 1980s all the contributors had to be undergraduates or graduates in the University of Oxford, so they often overlap with the list of winners of Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize for English Verse. Successive Oxford Professors of Poetry also appear often, both as patrons and contributors.

A brief appendix records contributors who fell in war.