When editors were gods

Editors vs. poets: The eternal struggle

Editor and poet face off in a 1902 newspaper cartoon.

 

Back in the bygone days when many magazines and even newspapers published poetry, a special subgenre of humor flourished: the editor vs. poet joke. Most often the poet was the butt of the joke, but sometimes the editor, and occasionally both of them.

Typically the editor was gruff and impatient, sometimes to the point of violence. In many such jokes, poets are kicked down stairs, hurled out into the street, or in at least a few cases, threatened with murder.

For their part, poets are usually either powerless supplicants or haughty figures with an exaggerated sense of their importance and the worth of their wares.

We've printed many examples over the years, but here are a few more in honor of what we understand to be National Poetry Month.

Editor to poet: "That's the best poem you ever wrote."

Poet: "I'm glad you like it."

Editor: "I don't."

(1933)

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Poet to editor: "I hope that you didn’t throw my poem into the wastebasket?"

Editor: "Oh, no."

Poet (eagerly): "Then you accepted it?"

Editor: "Now, I threw it out of the window."

(1917)

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Poet to editor: "I send you a poem, 'Why Do I Live?' Please answer."

Editor: "Because you send your poem by mail."

(1896)

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Friends and editors

"The business of a magazine is to make many friends." — Perriton Maxwell, editor of the Metropolitan Magazine, 1904.

"I now go on the principle that a journalist isn't entitled to friends, or an editor, either." — New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross, in a 1941 letter to Brendan Gill, future author of the memoir "Here at the New Yorker," reprinted in "Letters From the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross" (The Modern Library, 2000).

"[O]nly a seriously disturbed person would sincerely wish to have an editor for a friend..." — author George V. Higgins in his 1990 book "On Writing."

 

Clerks with earphones

"People with earphones, computers with partitions, no longer freewheeling. Editors became clerks rather than editors, just at their computer terminals all day long. In the past, it was about moving around and talking to people." — Former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, reflecting on the state of magazine editing today in an interview with Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, March 16, 2025.

Carter was promoting his new memoir, "When the Going Was Good."

How about a new National Magazine Awards category for best editor's note on behalf of a tote bag?

This would be my nominee:

 

 

And the bag itself is pretty nice, too.

 

Bad grammar, lack of taste, stupidity: A writer's horror story

"There are so many inexperienced and inept editors in the magazine business these days that what starts out as a competent piece often appears as a horror, and the writer is blamed by the unfortunate reader for the editor's bad grammar, lack of taste, and stupidity." — Richard Gehman in his book "How to Write and Sell Magazine Articles," 1959.

Gehman was a prolific magazine writer who also managed to publish 19 books by the time of his death in 1972, at age 50.

Editing, R.I.P.

"Editing, though, is a dying art…. If you were to look back to the year 1925 and read or listen to everything published on any given day—in books and magazines, in newspapers and newsletters and radio broadcasts—nearly all of it, with the heart-thumping exception of live sports broadcasts, would have gone through an editorial process. Editors, the good ones, anyway, would have considered whether what was being said was said clearly and stated fairly. A century on, in an age of tweets and TikToks and Substack posts and chatty podcasts, a vanishingly small percentage of the crushingly vast amount that is published on any given day has been edited, by anyone." — Jill Lepore, writing in the February 17 & 24, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, which celebrates the magazine's 100^th anniversary.

Lepore's article, "War of Words," is a fascinating look at the fraught relationship between the magazine's editors and writers over the past century, by an author who obviously knows her way around an archive. A lot of her material will be fresh even to those of us who've read our share of the crushingly vast number of books about the magazine and its alumni.

Better than an elevator man, not quite a saint

"As a group, editors are doubtless far above other groups of wage-earners such as coal miners, elevator men, ushers, and waiters. They are probably law abiding and normally pleasant husbands. But all this offers no sane excuse for elevating the profession of editorship to that of a saint."  — Writer's Digest magazine, May 1930.

The sad plight of the unknown genius, 1913

"The magazine editor much prefers to accept drivel from a well-known writer to even the perusal of the manuscript by the unknown genius. The statement so often made that merit is sure of recognition is undiluted falsehood. Magazine editors are not ceaselessly watching, as they pretend, for originality. They dread it." — The Argonaut magazine, October 4, 1913

The travails of the magazine short-story writer, 1950

"The short-story writer lives at the mercy of magazine editors, whose habits are more mercurial than Shelley's wild west wind… The story that would have been accepted yesterday is rejected today because: (1) 'We've had two stories about daffy undertakers this year,' (2) 'The big boss liked it right up to the ending. Then he said no,' (3) 'We've had a shake-up here at Everyday, and the orders are we've got to use up our back inventory.'" — James A. Michener, in "The Writer's Book," 1950.

One writer's opinion of the value add of editors

"Personally, I am of such a sensitive nature that I cannot stand to read my own articles and stories in magazines. Whenever somebody compliments me on something I wrote, I have a stock answer: 'It was better going in than coming out.'"
   — Writer Rex Lardner, reflecting in his experiences with editors in "Blue Pencil Blues," Escapade magazine, June 1964.

Editor Willie Morris on the editor's 'pretension to greatness'

"When you're dealing with writing and journalism, the role of the editor in chief is to have the pretension to greatness. You work with editors whom you trust and encourage writers to write to the highest level they can. There's a natural hostility between writers and editors—you can't do anything about that." — Willie Morris, then the editor of Harper’s magazine, quoted in the book "Conversations With Willie Morris."

The editorial genius of Bernarr Macfadden, according to Bernarr Macfadden

"Macfadden knows people and he knows life. That is the simple secret of his success. His editorial technique isn't always pretty—because life isn't always pretty…. He deals in stark realities because he knows that the real people for whom his magazines are meant, think real thoughts, hope real hopes and live real lives." — from a house ad in Macfadden's Liberty magazine, December 1936.

Bernarr Macfadden's other magazines included True Story, Physical Culture, and Photoplay.