of X appeared we were starting to attract unpublished writers of the kind we were looking for." David Wright in an interview with Poetry Nation: "I received a letter from the Irish painter Patrick Swift [they had first met in Soho in 1953] inviting me to come in with him to edit a new quarterly. The backing was to come via the remarkable Mrs St John Hutchinson. We called the magazine X, after its dictionary definition ‘the unknown quantity’. The actual backer I was never to meet, but through his generosity X was able to pay contributors on the scale of Encounter. The first number came out at the end of 1959, the seventh and last in 1962. We were out to provide a platform for the individual vision, not accepted avant-gardisme or second-hand attitudes. While the list of contributors remained international, from among the native English X managed to recruit at least [three] new poets who certainly would not have been elsewhere given a hearing [ Brian Higgins, C. H. Sisson and Cliff Ashby ]." Other artists that were involved, to a greater or lesser extent, with Wright and Swift in the production of X included Dom Moraes ("co-opted as an unofficial assistant"), David Gascoyne (translator and reviewer of foreign books), Elizabeth Smart and Anthony Cronin (who also wrote under the pseudonym Martin Gerard); in several numbers George Barker, Cronin, Pierre Leyris and Gascoyne are included as correspondents. PN Review: "Apart from providing a platform for such then-neglected poets as Patrick Kavanagh, George Barker, Stevie Smith and Hugh MacDiarmid, its editors hoped—though not too confidently—to uncover some of the 'unknown quantities' that they knew might be finding it difficult to get into print, either because their ideas and attitudes were not among those currently received, or their verse and prose not cut to the fashion of the day. In this respect the magazine did pretty well, considering its short life... Two novelists—John McGahern and Aidan Higgins—and several now well-known painters, including Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, were first featured in its pages...But the best justification of the magazine, and of its editors' ambitions, was the discovery, or rather the recognition, of two or three authentic but unpublished—and at that time apparently unpublishable—poets..." CJ Fox (Canadian journalist and critic): "The contents of the seven issues of X that preceded its demise in 1962 vividly reflect the rebellious spirit