Gibson was born in Hexham, Northumberland and left the north for London in 1912 after his father died. He had been publishing poems in magazines since 1897, and the collections Stonefolds, On The Threshold, were published by the Wayland publishers in 1914, and followed by The Web of Life in 1908.

Despite his residence in London and later on in Gloucestershire, many of Gibson's poems both then and later, have Northumberland settings: Hexham's Market Cross; Hareshaw; and The Kielder Stone. Others deal with poverty and passion amid wild Northumbrian landscapes. Still others are devoted to fishermen, industrial workers and miners, often alluding to local ballads and the rich folk-song heritage of the North East.

It was in London that he met both Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke, becoming a close friend and later Brooke's literary executor (with Lascelles Abercrombie and Walter de la Mare). This was at the period when the first Georgian Poetry anthology was being hatched. Gibson was one of the insiders.

During the early part of his writing life, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson wrote poems that featured the "macabre." One such poem is Flannan Isle, based on a real life mystery.

Gibson was one of the founders of the so-called ”Dymock Poets”, a community of writers who settled briefly, before the outbreak of the Great War, in the village of Dymock, in north Gloucestershire.

His reputation was eclipsed somewhat by the Ezra Pound-T. S. Eliot school of Modernist poetry; his work remained popular.