Magee began his education at the American School in Nanking in 1929. In 1931 he moved with his mother to England and spent the following four years at St Clare, a preparatory school for boys, in Walmer, in the county of Kent. From 1935 to 1939 he attended Rugby School, where he developed the ambition to become a poet, and whilst at the school won its Poetry Prize in 1938. He was impressed by the school's Roll of Honour listing its pupils who had fallen in the First World War, which included the Edwardian poet Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), whose writing style Magee emulated. Brooke had won the school's Poetry Prize 34 years prior to Magee. The prize-winning poem by Magee centred upon the burial of Brooke's body at 11 o'clock at night in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros in April 1915.