Fenton was born in 1949 in Lincoln, England, to Mary Hamilton Ingoldby Fenton and John Charles Fenton, an Anglican priest. At the age of nine, Fenton was sent to musical preparatory school, then on to Repton Public School in Derbyshire, before entering Magdalen College in Oxford in 1967. Fenton began his stay at Oxford studying English with the poet John Fuller, who became his mentor and friend. But the life of a poet had little professional appeal to Fenton, who switched to a course of study of philosophy, psychology, and physiology—the three Ps. He believed he wanted to be an anthropologist. A school friend from those early days recalls that Fenton said he wanted a job like anyone else because one couldn't just be a poet. Fenton's pull to poetry began when he read "About this House," W. H. Auden's collection of verse. Fenton met Auden...