Ted Hughes and Philip Hobsbaum chose not to let their experience of Cambridge literary life stop on graduation. Hughes continued to haunt the town and its literary circles. At the party that launched St Botolph's Review, he would meet a young American poet on a Fulbright scholarship who was discovering what it was like to be berated for ‘beginning a poem like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John Donne’: Sylvia Plath. Philip Hobsbaum went to London to train as a teacher, and there re-established his reading group. The Group's first meeting was held in Hobsbaum's Edgware Road flat in October 1955; its attendees were: Hughes, Peter Redgrove, Julian and Catherine Cooper, two actors, Patricia Hartz and Leon Cripps, and Hobsbaum's fiancée, Hannah Kelly. Among other contributions that evening were Hughes's ‘Misanthrope’ and ‘Secretary’ and Redgrove's ‘Bedtime Story for my Son’: astonishingly good poems from a couple of recent graduates, the last-named perhaps the most impressive of the three, and perhaps the first cause of Hobsbaum's peculiar preference for Redgrove's poetry over Hughes's. In November, Julian Cooper invited the Australian bookseller Peter Porter to attend meetings. Four months later, they were joined by Edward Lucie-Smith, who had been in contact with Hobsbaum as an undergraduate at Oxford but who had been doing his military service in the RAF. As the 1950s wore on, the Group's number was added to by the somewhat older Martin Bell, and by contemporaries such as Alan Brownjohn, the BBC producer George MacBeth and the Canadian David Wevill.

One way of stating the Group's importance is to declare it a forerunner to the contemporary poetry workshop, or indeed to deem it the first proper poetry workshop in England. At the same time, it should be stressed that Group meetings had a flavour that would make them unfamiliar to most who attend poetry workshops today. Not only was there the bearded and forbidding Hobsbaum in the chair and a heavy Leavisite aspect to proceedings, there was also the structure of the evening: its first half would concentrate on new work by one writer; this would then be followed by a coffee break, after which members could share work they particularly liked and, increasingly in later years, new poetry of their own.