Men of experience will tell you that nothing is much more difficult than launching a new periodical. With a large staff, persistent efforts, capable planning, and an ample budget, including immense sums for advertising, it is sometimes possible to put a new magazine into the field. But what, when no staff at all is available, and no funds for advertising except through occasional circulars? This, in general, is the situation for all poetry magazines, at least those not backed by bountiful grants; and Wings, therefore, represented the rule and not the exception. Of course, no poetry magazine aims at corralling its readers by the millions; hundreds of subscribers look as numerous to its publishers as hundreds of thousands would appear to the proprietor of a more popular sheet; and there is no thought of the vast business arrangements necessary for its larger cousins.

The distinction, however, runs even deeper than this, for whereas the profit motive rules in most periodicals, it does not apply at all for a poetry magazine. There is no profit motive, since there is no prospect of a profit—I would not say, “no possibility,” for I know that Wings, which for long periods has achieved the feat of breaking almost if not quite even, one year actually earned a surplus of $95.13. Of course, such a banner success is rare; and the publisher, not expecting much if anything but debts to be left when the year is over, must necessarily subordinate the profit motive to the as-little-loss-as-possible motive.

Having made this dire confession, I must go on to report that Wings was from the first an unexpected success. I say “unexpected,” for I had not known what to anticipate, and had listened just a little doubtfully to Flora’s prediction that the magazine would succeed. But let me point out that it seems to me that the idea of success has been grossly, vulgarly, ignorantly entangled in modern thought with the concept of financial gain: few of the great successes of history, from Confucius to Kant, and from Homer to Goethe, and Galileo to Einstein, and Gautama to Gandhi, are in any way memorable for monetary triumphs. Not that the motive behind a poetry magazine may be compared with the impulse that ruled any of these great figures, but that they all have at least one thing in common: their guardian star has been something other than money. The pecuniary status of a poetry magazine is, of course, irrelevant—irrelevant, that is, to anything but the owner’s pocket, a matter of no importance at all to the world at large. What is relevant is whether the effort has helped the cause of art or creation, whether it has broadcasted pleasure or inspiration, whether it has aided aspiring and worthy writers and given them a platform from which to be heard.

Before many issues of Wings were out, approving letters, often accompanied by subscriptions, were arriving from all parts of the country; and floods of contributions, many of them from persons I had never heard of before, began to be addressed to “Editor, Wings.” Not that the great majority were of much value; but how eagerly I pored through the piles, hoping to unearth the rare divine contribution! I will not say that my search brought to light any latter-day Milton, or any new Ode on a Grecian Urn or Ode to the West Wind; but many gratifying contributions were contained in those growing heaps of long envelopes, including poems that, I still believe, are of enduring value, though often the author was unknown and in some cases remains unknown.

I shall never forget, for example, the glow of discovery when Mary Cecile Ions, writing from Coral Gables, Florida, submitted to a Wings contest her twelve-stanza poem, Letter to the Dead in Spring, beginning:

Who was Mary Cecile Ions? I do not know, except that she had graduated from the University of Alabama with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and subsequently taught English and French. But I cannot say what else she has accomplished, and in fact have seen little of her work. Nevertheless, the poem, which the judges agreed in putting first of all the submissions, has clung to my memory. I was gratified when the well-known British anthologist Thomas Moult confirmed our good opinion by reprinting it in The Best Poems of 1935; and ten years later, I had no hesitation in giving it a place in my own anthology, The Music Makers.

Or take the case of Otto Freund. Although he had contributed to various magazines, I had known nothing of him or his work until he began sending me, from Portland, Oregon, a series of poems of unusual depth and accomplishment. Rarely, for example, does one come across four lines with the finality of Requiescat, written in memory of John Barrymore:

Whole elegies are contained in the above; and whole volumes of grief are compressed in Heart Wound:

With sorrow I report that Otto Freund has silently dropped out of the fold. One day, many years ago, he wrote me that he was leaving for the east; he did not mention any reason, nor give any forwarding address—and that is the last I have heard of him or his work, though I have never ceased to regret his disappearance.

Or consider Francis Vaughan Meisling. All that I know of him is that he was a journalist and foreign correspondent, who sent me a single poem from Los Angeles. And yet this poem, I Dreamt She Came, has a real lyrical quality—the sort that makes an editor feel that his labors have not been wholly in vain:

Next my mind goes back to Celia Keegan, a Long Island girl whose work, as in the case of Miss Ions, I first noticed among the submissions in a contest, though I afterwards met her at a gathering of Wings contributors in my apartment in New York. She sent Wings some of the most poignant poems of love I can remember; I cannot forbear quoting the whole of Renunciation:

Miss Keegan, like Mr. Freund, vanished suddenly from my ken, and likewise from that of some mutual friends, who heard their last from her about twenty years ago. Whither has she gone? To join the songbirds of last spring?

Then there was the case of Florence Wilson Roper, formerly of Petersburg, Virginia, but now deceased, whose poems had first attracted me in the pages of the Dallas verse magazine, Kaleidograph, and who won one of the annual book-publishing awards of that periodical. She too contributed many moving poems of love, and many reflective pieces, as in the sequence of five sonnets, Retrospect, with some exquisite lines, such as

But I have set out to write a narrative, and not to compile an anthology, and cannot go on to quote other excerpts. In any case, the occasional discovery of such material, more than anything else, made me feel that Wings was indeed serving a purpose, and might be accounted a modest success.

Meanwhile, with the feeling of an inexperienced rider clutching at a balky steed, I was attempting to manage the new enterprise. The second and third issues were put forth in California, by a printer recommended by Arthur Chamberlain; but the following issues, during my remaining five years in New York and even for a time afterwards, all proceeded from the metropolis. But in New York, aside from Mr. Post’s connections, I knew no printer. I tried one who, due to an error, trimmed the magazine down so far as to give it a truncated appearance; I tried another, who inked the pages so badly that they were painful to read; and then one day, not knowing where to turn, I walked into the office of a small establishment in Washington Heights, the Artype Press, and made arrangements with its proprietor, Paul Grossman. Though picked merely by chance, he proved to be conscientious and capable, and did a good job so long as geographical considerations made it possible to leave the printing in his hands.

I need hardly add that our agreement provided for a price which, in these more expensive days, would hardly suffice for printing more than a few pages of Wings. Had present-day rates prevailed, I would have been blocked by unscalable walls, even before I started. And this makes me wonder as to the fate today of editors in approximately my former position. I should like to know just how the development of art, literature, and culture in general may be affected by our “higher” standards of living and the accompanying higher standards of inflation.

But let me go back to my problems as an editor. They were to be many, and seasoned with curious vicissitudes. Not a few of them, as I suppose is true for most editors, were to proceed from the daily mailbag, which was in a sense a grab-bag, since I never knew what I would pull out of it. In the course of the years, there were to be many sweet and beautiful letters, which I would value as among the chief compensations of an editor’s task; but there were also to be letters of various other types.

I will never forget, for example, the lady who mailed me a sentimental lyric on The Old Plush Sofa, and accompanied the manuscript with a strip of purple velvet. “I thought you might appreciate the poem better,” she obligingly wrote, “if you had a piece of the sofa before you.”

Again, there was the correspondent who, having sent me a page-long list of all the places where his work had appeared, from the Newtown High School Quarterback to the Green Plains Meteor, followed it two days later with an air-mail apology: one of his poems had not actually seen the light in the New Age Hardwareman, as he had absent-mindedly declared; it had blossomed forth in the New Era Hardwareman.

Another case, which also earned an editorial smile, was that of the verse-writer who wrote in from a small Canadian town. He hoped I would publish his poems, but if so, would I not kindly pick a nom de plume? The reason, he explained, was that he could not let it be known that he wrote poetry: he was one of his city’s policemen.

Then occasionally a would-be contributor has sent a letter of several single-spaced typewritten pages, or, worse still, in largely illegible handwriting, devoted to personal reminiscences interlarded with questions. As well as I could, I have usually answered the questions, if they pertained to poetry; but time and eye-power are limited—and more than once an oversight has brought me another letter, of almost equal length, in which I am properly reproved: “Dear Editor: You have not answered the question in the third paragraph of the fourth page of my last note....”

The editor of a poetry magazine, I soon discovered, is regarded as the chief clerk of a public bureau of consultation and criticism, whose duty is not only to answer questions, but to give advice, and comment on manuscripts—all, of course, absolutely without compensation (not even in gratitude, since frank criticism is likely to win one nothing but an enraged correspondent). To an extent, the editor is willing, even glad to accept the mantle laid upon his shoulders—but there are, unfortunately, limits to his endurance. Those limits are reached, for example, when he receives a bulky manuscript, accompanied by a note: “Dear Sir: I am sending you herewith Ruminations, an epic of 4,700 lines, some considerable parts of which I hope you will publish in your next issue. If not, will appreciate detailed criticism.”

Again, one’s patience is severely tested by a letter such as this:

Ah, if these people would only realize that the editor is not only engaged in running a magazine, but incidentally is trying to earn a living!

Beyond all the above, there is the aspiring contributor who goes out of his way to find ingenious means of attracting attention. An occasional method is to send a poem (one such, received not long ago, was exactly two lines long) in a huge envelope by special delivery; this usually arrives just when the editor is in the middle of dinner, and does succeed in drawing attention to itself—though not always the attention that results in an acceptance. Again, there is the versifier who mails a poem on each successive day for two or three weeks. One does, indeed, note the fact that he exists, and even gets used to him in a way; one rather misses him when at length the daily submissions cease. But alas for the assiduous poet! he gets just the same attention as everybody else, and if he stands out in any way, it is as just a sort of amiable pest.

More common are the decorative means of attracting attention. One poet, invariably a lady, will adorn her manuscript with graceful water colors in pastel tints—all very pleasant to look at, but, unfortunately, not in the least improving the quite hopeless verses. Another rhymester will submit poems in lavender or purple ink on goldenrod-yellow paper; still another will send poems typed in a glaring red, or typed all in capitals, or oddly letter-spaced—all of which do, indeed, give the poems a unique appearance, though the authors seem not to realize that their chances of acceptance are not improved by anything that makes the work harder to read.

But these are minor matters, which I can pass over with a smile. There is, however, one type of letter that causes me to glare. It arrives periodically, and is usually worded about as follows:

I need only say that the poems Spring Flowers, April Sunshine, and First Love do not long clutter up the editorial office. Though I may be fiendishly eager for subscriptions, I am not quite so hungry for them as the correspondent evidently supposes. No, though I may be corrupt as old Boss Tweed himself, I am not to be tempted by bribes of one dollar. The author, by his supposed shrewdness, has insured an action I would not otherwise willingly take. Since I could not accept the poems without the imputation of having done so for ulterior motives, I have no choice but to return them without even a reading, and usually with a printed rejection slip.

In one of the several variations of the above letter, the author notifies me that he has just put out a book, and is sending it for review; immediately upon the appearance of the article, he will join the subscription list. He might be surprised to know that, after this letter, his chances for a review would be as great if the book were printed in Chinese.

Then there is the versifier—comparatively rare, it is true—who seems to imagine that a subscription dollar automatically provides a ticket of admission to the pages of the magazine. She (for I cannot recall any men who committed this particular indiscretion) begins with a fulsome letter of praise, telling how much the quarterly means to her, and how she would not be without it—no, not for the world. Accompanying the letter, is a dollar bill, and five or six poems. The dollar bill is accepted by the subscription department; the poems, being unworthy of acceptance, go back to the author, along with a polite note of thanks and regret. And thus the tempest is unleashed. By return mail, another letter arrives—one which, somehow, has lost the admiring tone of the earlier epistle:

Since it is worth more than the price to have the writer off the list, I do indeed return the dollar and cancel the subscription.

A less infrequent type of correspondent is the one who waits till the year’s end before making his feelings known. Then he vents his stored-up disappointment:

There is, of course, nothing for the editor to say in reply. But he cannot help asking himself why writers seem invariably to blame editors for the lacks in their own work; and he is inclined to wonder how many readers would be claimed by magazines such as Harpers, the Atlantic, and the Saturday Review if they were expected to rely upon the subscriptions of contributors.

The sad fact is that there actually are some poetry magazines that publish only subscribers’ poems; I know of one that, some years ago, promised to print one poem a year by every subscriber. Such magazines, which cannot possibly maintain any standards whatever, have apparently given certain verse-writers the idea that they should be taken as models. And the results have not always been happy for other periodicals, as will be seen not only from the examples given above, but from a letter which reached me just today from a writer who, though never published in Wings, began by lauding the magazine, and went on to say:

The thing I particularly note here is the word “obliged.” I can safely attest that no writer, whatever his complaints, has ever been able justly to use that word in connection with Wings.

Along with the pricks and prods of those who would like to see the editorial and subscription departments merged, there have been the problems of submitted manuscripts in general. One of the first duties of an editor, of course, is to say “No!”; after all, it is difficult to find room for all the available good material. But “No!” is at all times a painful syllable to utter; the editor knows what warmth, hope, and even devotion have gone into many of the poems, and what a chilling blow a rejection can be. And if this is normally true, there are times when “No!” literally sticks on the lips. One of those times is when manuscripts are submitted or a book is sent in for review by an old acquaintance or friend, a writer whom one especially likes, or to whom one feels a personal obligation. Nevertheless, “No!” must be said just as firmly in these cases as in others—though the after-effects are sometimes disheartening. Thus, I remember that some poems were once submitted by another editor, toward whom I felt warmly disposed, and who had, some years before, accepted some of my own work for a college publication. But his own verses were not good—and so what could I do but return them with a friendly note, meant to be disarming? I had thought that an ex-editor, even though an editor only in a small way, would understand, but perhaps he was moved by higher principles, beyond my comprehension. In any event, I know that when, sometime later, I had occasion to speak to him over the telephone, he suffered a sudden attack of amnesia in regard to my name.

Another time when it hurts one to say “No!” is when an expectant contributor has been submitting again and again, trying very, very hard to produce acceptable material. “Why, why do you not keep any of my work?” he may ask, plaintively. But can the editor help it if the writer has not mastered the problems of his craft? True, the editor can and does give hints and suggestions—at least, when the work seems promising. But there are many, very many cases in which hints or suggestions would be of no avail.

This brings me to the problem of criticism in general. Many contributors ask for it, and seem to look for it almost as a matter of course, as in the case of a letter (sent in with insufficient postage) in my current mail: “Enclosed please find copies of some poems. I do not necessarily expect that you would consider publishing any of them, but would appreciate criticism.” Unfortunately, if the editor heeded all the requests, he would not have time to eat or sleep. Even in the few cases in which he does attempt criticism, he proceeds at his peril—that is, when he deals with inexperienced writers (the “arrived” or professional author is invariably receptive to criticism). More than one beginner, having asked me for comments, has flared into fury upon receiving them, and has written in indignantly to put me in my place, assuring me, in effect, that I could not distinguish a poem from a potato. No wonder that editors become wary about criticizing!

Then there was the woman whose poem would have been acceptable except for one grossly inept word, for which it was easy to suggest a suitable substitute. Hence I wrote her, commending the poem, and returning it to her with the promise to accept it if it were changed as recommended. Back came the poem in an early mail, along with the author’s outraged assertion that her poems were put down just as God dictated them, and that to change a syllable would be sacrilegious. Of course, it is impossible to argue with God. And so the poem made its second return trip to the divinely inspired author. So far as I know, it has still not been shared with the reading public.

I shall never forget, likewise, the young man who, in the early days of Wings, made an impromptu and uninvited visit to my apartment, accompanied by a sheaf of poems, which he asked me to glance over. Being still greener than a cucumber, I took him at his word, and literally did glance over the material; a glance, in most cases, was all that was needed, since it is no more necessary to read all of a bad poem in order to know it is bad than it is necessary to swallow all of a bad apple in order to be sure it is not honey-sweet. But perhaps my speed of reading displeased the young author, or perhaps something in my expression was to blame (for I have never learned the art of the poker-face, a desirable acquisition for editors). Whatever the cause, he sprang to his feet, his cheeks flaming red; snatched the manuscript from my hand; and stormed toward the door. “If that’s how you read manuscripts, Mr. Coblentz—” was all he could sputter. Then, inarticulate with rage, he went stamping out, and slammed the door behind him. Since that day, I have made it a rule never, never to read a manuscript in the author’s presence.

And while on the subject of criticism, let me tell about Mr. Cooley. Who he was, I cannot say; I have never seen him, and do not even know if I spell his name correctly; all that I can say is that, during the fledgling days of Wings, he introduced himself to me by telephone as a native of the Bronx, and proceeded to read one of his poems, on which he solicited my comments. No one but a newcomer at editing, I am sure, would have given the comments: nowadays I would ask the writer to send the manuscript through the mails. However, I did yield to Mr. Cooley’s request, and thenceforth, unhappily, whenever he committed a poem, he would hastily telephone me. As his favorite time of composition was late at night, the telephone usually rang just as I was in the process of retiring; more than once, having no clairvoyant perception of who was at the other end of the line, I rushed out of bed, and hastily donned my dressing gown. But I was less elated than Cooley may have supposed when I heard his hearty voice, “I’ve just written another, and will read it to you!” Poor Cooley! I had then, as ever since, a great amount of sympathy for the creative fervor. But there were times when, yawning and hardly able to keep awake while he read some interminable bit of blank verse, I devoutly wished that the telephone had never been invented.

Another problem, affecting Wings in its early days, was connected with another magazine, an aviation monthly which went by the same name. Whether it antedated my publication I do not know, but I have an impression that it had existed before, had been discontinued, and had been revived after the establishment of my own magazine. Though neither periodical ever questioned the other’s right to use the name, both were put to much inconvenience—I know this from the sets of poems occasionally forwarded to me from the other Wings (which did not publish poetry), and from the long stories on flying experiences that sometimes added to my own mail, along with articles on subjects such as The Problem of Air-Cooled Engines and Projected Explorations of the Upper Stratosphere. Many years later, after the rival Wings had ceased to be, I still received an occasional letter inquiring in which issue we had published a discussion of High Octane Gasoline and Cargo Planes or Air Flight Records in the Southern Hemisphere.

As if such problems did not add sufficiently to life’s spice and variety, there was the recurrent dilemma of the racketeer. You would suppose that, in a field like poetry, where idealism is supposed to rule and the prospects for financial profit are slight, the racketeer would be as unknown as the hired assassin. But such, I discovered, was far from the case. In a page of short comments and news items entitled Wing Beats, I like to give publicity to new enterprises of possible advantage to poets; but it was always difficult to be sure whether or not a given project would actually be beneficial. And in the callow early years of the magazine, I had several unfortunate experiences.

One case was that of the publisher who announced a forthcoming anthology, for which he was seeking contributions. He mentioned several well-known poets who would be represented, and requested a brief notice, which I was constrained to grant. What he had neglected to say, however, was that while the well-known poets did indeed appear and of course were not asked to pay, the rank and file of the contributors were required to subscribe for half a dozen copies each, at four dollars a copy.

A similar scheme, for which I was repeatedly asked to give space, involved composers who set poems to music, as the basis for promised public concerts that were never held; and collected fees of about ten dollars for each selection. This, it must be said, was hardly more reprehensible than the action of the publisher who, also inviting a free notice, issued a Who’s Who in American Poetry; it turned out that this “indispensable directory,” aside from listing a few of the obvious leaders, acknowledged the importance only of bards who would dole out four dollars and seventy-five cents each for a copy. I fear that I smiled just a little wrily to discover that many devotees of the Muse, who “just could not afford” one dollar to support a legitimate enterprise, had apparently no hesitation about investing in rackets of this type.

But for unblushing chicanery, the publishers of the alleged Who’s Who were scarcely equal to a certain mid-Western authors’ review which solicited an exchange advertisement. As it claimed a considerable circulation and I knew of no good reason to distrust its statements, I thought it to my advantage to accept the advertisement—which announced that it would begin publishing poetry with its next issue, and would pay a specified sum. So far, so good! not only Wings, but six or eight other poetry magazines, ran the advertisement. And how deeply we were all to regret our rashness! Before long, our mailbags began to bear almost daily complaints; many readers had submitted manuscripts to the authors’ review—and invariably with the same result. One poem by each writer was accepted, but not by the magazine to which it had been submitted. The poem enjoyed the still more inviting fate of being kept for the Thornwall Anthology, a “beautiful volume” in preparation “on a cooperative basis”—which is to say that each contributor must cooperate to the extent of purchasing twelve dollars’ worth of copies.

I should add that the authors’ review, now long out of existence, never did publish or pay for any poem whatever.