The group included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Ralph Hodgson, and John Drinkwater.
The period of publication was sandwiched between the Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and Modernism, with its strident rejection of pure aestheticism.
The idea for an anthology began as a joke, when Marsh, Duncan Grant, and George Mallory decided, one evening in 1912, to publish a parody of the many small poetry books that were appearing at the time.
Marsh and Brooke approached poet and bookseller Harold Monro, who had recently opened The Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street, in Bloomsbury, London.
The subsequent fate of the Georgian poets (inevitably known as the Squirearchy) then became an aspect of the critical debate surrounding modernist poetry, as marked by the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land at just that time.