Famous Editor Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Editor poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous editor poems. These examples illustrate what a famous editor poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Editor Whedon

by Edgar Lee Masters
 To be able to see every side of every question;
To be on every side, to be everything, to be nothing long;
To pervert truth, to ride it for a purpose,
To use great feelings and passions of the human family
For base designs, for cunning ends,
To wear a mask like the Greek actors --
Your eight-page paper -- behind which you huddle,
Bawling through...Read more of this...

Every Dead One Has a Name

by Taja Kramberger
Every dead one has a name,
only the names of the living make us falter.
Some names are impossible to utter
without a stammer and a fidget,
some can only be spoken 
through allusion,
and some, mostly women’s,
are forbidden in these parts.

Every dead one has a name,
engraved in stone,
printed in obituary or directory,
but my name must be undermined,
every few years
soiled and substituted
with another one.

A decade...Read more of this...

Rubber Souls

by Andrei Voznesensky
 I hate you, rubber souls, you seem 
 to stretch to fit any regime. 

 They'll give a yawning smile, stretched wide, 
 and, like an octopus, they'll draw you tight. 

 A rubber man is an elusive rogue: 
 a fist gets sucked into the bog. 

 The rubber editor is scared of script, 
 the author is...Read more of this...

Athor and Asar

by Aleister Crowley
 [Dedicated to Frank Harris, editor of Vanity Fair]

On the black night, beneath the winter moon,
I clothed me in the limbs of Codia,
Swooning my soul out into her red throat,
So that the glimmer of our skins, the tune
Og our ripe rythm, seemed the hideous play
Of death-worms crawling on a corpse,afloat
With life that takes its thirst
Only from things accurst.

Closer than Clodia's...Read more of this...

The Hypnotist

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 A man once read with mind surprised 
Of the way that people were "hypnotised"; 
By waving hands you produced, forsooth, 
A kind of trance where men told the truth! 
His mind was filled with wond'ring doubt; 
He grabbed his hat and he started out, 
He walked the street and he made a "set" 
At the first half-dozen folk he...Read more of this...

Three Songs For Mayday Morning

by Barry Tebb
 ( I )


for ‘JC’ of the TLS

Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam

Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there

Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,

Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone – 

Vague sad memories of mam n’dad

Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.

Hosannas of sweet May mornings

Whitsun glory of lilac blooming

Sixty years on I run and run

From death,...Read more of this...

A Hundred Collars

by Robert Frost
 Lancaster bore him--such a little town, 
Such a great man. It doesn't see him often 
Of late years, though he keeps the old homestead 
And sends the children down there with their mother 
To run wild in the summer--a little wild. 
Sometimes he joins them for a day or two 
And sees old friends he somehow can't get near....Read more of this...

What The Thunder Said

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
  After the frosty silence in the gardens
  After the agony in stony places
  The shouting and the crying
  Prison and palace and reverberation
  Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
  He who was living is now dead
  We who were living are now dying
  With...Read more of this...

Typographical

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The Editor wrote his political screed 
In ink that was fainter and fainter; 
He rose to the call of his country's need, 
And in spiderish characters wrote with speed, 
A column on "Cutting the Painter". 
The "reader" sat in his high-backed chair, 
For literals he was a hunter; 
But he stared aghast at the column long 
Of the editorial...Read more of this...

A Little History

by David Lehman
 Some people find out they are Jews.
They can't believe it.
Thy had always hated Jews.
As children they had roamed in gangs on winter nights in the old
 neighborhood, looking for Jews.
They were not Jewish, they were Irish.
They brandished broken bottles, tough guys with blood on their
 lips, looking for Jews.
They intercepted Jewish boys walking alone and beat them up.
Sometimes they...Read more of this...

A Following

by Charles Bukowski
 the phone rang at 1:30 a.m.
 and it was a man from Denver:

 "Chinaski, you got a following in
 Denver..."
 "yeah?"
 "yeah, I got a magazine and I want some
 poems from you..."
 "**** YOU, CHINASKI!" I heard a voice
 in the background...
 "I see you have a friend,"
 I said.
 "yeah," he answered, "now, I want
 six poems..."
...Read more of this...

E.C. Culbertson

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Is it true, Spoon River,
That in the hall-way of the New Court House
There is a tablet of bronze
Containing the embossed faces
Of Editor Whedon and Thomas Rhodes?
And is it true that my successful labors
In the County Board, without which
Not one stone would have been placed on another,
And the contributions out of my own pocket
To build the temple, are but memories...Read more of this...

Huddersfield - The Second Poetry Capital Of England

by Barry Tebb
 It brings to mind Swift leaving a fortune to Dublin

‘For the founding of a lunatic asylum - no place needs it more’.

The breathing beauty of the moors and cheap accommodation

Drew me but the total barbarity of the town stopped me from

Writing a single line: from the hideous facade of its railway

Station - Betjeman must have been drunk or mad...Read more of this...

The Fire Sermon

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
  The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
  Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
  Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
  Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
  Or...Read more of this...

Aner Clute

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Over and over they used to ask me,
While buying the wine or the beer,
In Peoria first, and later in Chicago,
Denver, Frisco, New York, wherever I lived,
How I happened to lead the life,
And what was the start of it.
Well, I told them a silk dress,
And a promise of marriage from a rich man --
(It was Lucius Atherton).
But that was not...Read more of this...

Poem To Be Placed In A Bottle And Cast Out To Sea

by Barry Tebb
 for Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in a bus called ‘Further...’





Dear _______ and here’s where the problem begins

For who shall I address this letter to?

Friends are few and very special, muses in the main

I must confess, the first I lost just fifty years ago.

Perhaps the best.



I searched for years and wrote en route

‘Bridge Over the Aire’ after that...Read more of this...

Jeduthan Hawley

by Edgar Lee Masters
 There would be a knock at the door
And I would arise at midnight and go to the shop,
Where belated travelers would hear me hammering
Sepulchral boards and tacking satin.
And often I wondered who would go with me
To the distant land, our names the theme
For talk, in the same week, for I've observed
Two always go together.
Chase Henry was paired with Edith...Read more of this...

The great journalist in spain

by Eugene Field
 Good editor Dana--God bless him, we say--
Will soon be afloat on the main,
Will be steaming away
Through the mist and the spray
To the sensuous climate of Spain.

Strange sights shall he see in that beautiful land
Which is famed for its soap and its Moor,
For, as we understand,
The scenery is grand
Though the system of railways is poor.

For moonlight of silver and sunlight...Read more of this...

The Burial Of The Dead

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
  Memory and desire, stirring
  Dull roots with spring rain.
  Winter kept us warm, covering
  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
  A little life with dried tubers.
  Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
  With a shower of rain; we stopped...Read more of this...

Who Learns My Lesson Complete?

by Walt Whitman
 WHO learns my lesson complete? 
Boss, journeyman, apprentice—churchman and atheist, 
The stupid and the wise thinker—parents and offspring—merchant, clerk, porter
 and
 customer, 
Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy—Draw nigh and commence; 
It is no lesson—it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
And that to another, and every one to another still. 

The great laws take and effuse without argument;...Read more of this...

Little Mack

by Eugene Field
 This talk about the journalists that run the East is bosh,
We've got a Western editor that's little, but, O gosh!
He lives here in Mizzoora where the people are so set
In ante-bellum notions that they vote for Jackson yet;
But the paper he is running makes the rusty fossils swear,--
The smartest, likeliest paper that is printed anywhere!
And, best of all, the...Read more of this...

The Lapse

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
This poem must be done to-day;
Then, I 'll e'en to it.
I must not dream my time away,—
I 'm sure to rue it.
The day is rather bright, I know
The Muse will pardon
My half-defection, if I go
Into the garden.
It must be better working there,—
I 'm sure it's sweeter:
And something in the balmy air
May clear my metre.
[In the Garden.]
Ah this is noble, what...Read more of this...

Kinsey Keene

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Your attention, Thomas Rhodes, president of the bank;
Coolbaugh Wedon, editor of the Argus;
Rev. Peet, pastor of the leading church;
A.D. Blood, several times Mayor of Spoon River;
And finally all of you, members of the Social Purity Club--
Your attention to Cambronne's dying words,
Standing with heroic remnant
Of Napoleon's guard on Mount Saint Jean
At the battle field of Waterloo,
When Maitland, the Englishman, called...Read more of this...

Orlie Wilde

by James Whitcomb Riley
 A goddess, with a siren's grace,--
A sun-haired girl on a craggy place
Above a bay where fish-boats lay
Drifting about like birds of prey.

Wrought was she of a painter's dream,--
Wise only as are artists wise,
My artist-friend, Rolf Herschkelhiem,
With deep sad eyes of oversize,
And face of melancholy guise.

I pressed him that he tell to me
This masterpiece's history.
He turned--REturned--and thus beguiled
Me with the...Read more of this...

Daisy Fraser

by Edgar Lee Masters
 Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon
Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received
For supporting candidated for office?
Or for writing up the canning factory
To get people to invest?
Or for suppressing the facts about the bank,
When it was rotten and ready to break?
Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge
Helping anyone except the "Q" railroad,
Or the bankers?...Read more of this...

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