Grigson was educated at St John's School, Leatherhead, and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He first came to prominence in the 1930s as a poet, then as editor from 1933 of the influential poetry magazine New Verse. A teacher, journalist and broadcaster, later in life he was a noted critic, reviewer (for the New York Review of Books in particular), and compiler of many inventive and innovative anthologies. He published 13 collections of poetry, and wrote on travel, on art (notably works on Samuel Palmer, Wyndham Lewis and Henry Moore), on the English countryside, and on botany, among other subjects. Geoffrey Grigson's first wife was Frances Galt (who died in 1937 of tuberculosis). With her, he founded New Verse. They had one daughter, Caroline (who was married to the designer Colin Banks). Grigson's second marriage was to Berta (Bertschy) Emma Kunert, who bore him two children, Anna and Lionel Grigson, the jazz musician and educator. Following their divorce, Grigson's third and last marriage was to Jane Grigson, née McIntire (1928–90), the writer on food and cookery. Their daughter is the cookery writer Sophie Grigson. Geoffrey Grigson in his later life lived partly in Wiltshire, England, and partly in Trôo, a village in the Loir-et-Cher département in France, which features in his poetry. He died in Wiltshire in 1985.

Edwin Muir, Orcadian poet, novelist and translator noted, together with his wife Willa Anderson, for making Franz Kafka available in English. Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936).