How to Be Faber Poetry Editor
Top tips from T.S. Eliot
What I propose to offer you this evening is a selection of the small fruit of my experience, picked in a somewhat haphazard manner.
T.S. Eliot, “The Publishing of Poetry”, address to the Society of Young Publishers (1952)
Faber and Faber are advertising for a new Poetry Editor. It’s not a job that comes up very often. But it’s a legendary position, not least because the first Faber Poetry Editor was T.S. Eliot.
The deadline for applications is soon. The ideal candidate, says the job description,
will be a discerning champion of contemporary poetry. They will be capable of maintaining the list’s exceptional editorial standards while breaking new ground in its publishing […] They will have the tact, the expertise and articulacy to advise poets on their work, combined with the ability to attract a growing and lasting audience for it.
So — for anyone who might be thinking of applying — here are some tips based on Eliot’s time in the job, as documented by Toby Faber’s Faber & Faber: The Untold Story (2019).
MANAGE YOUR AUTHOR’S EXPECTATIONS
There is not, of course, very much money in poetry for anybody, but we should like to add your name to our small and, I think, fairly select list.
T.S. Eliot to Marianne Moore, 5th January 1934
MANAGE YOUR READER’S EXPECTATIONS
His work is intelligible but unpopular
Description of Louis MacNeice’s Poems (1935), Faber & Faber Book Catalogue
ENCOURAGE YOUR AUTHOR TO SPREAD THE WORD
If you were the sort of guy who ever admitted anything you would admit that Faber & Faber are good publishers.
T.S. Eliot to Ezra Pound, 12th January 1934
USE HUMOUR IN THE WORKPLACE
At Messrs. Faber & Faber’s Book Committee yesterday […] the cracker was produced from under the table and successfully fired. It exploded with a loud report, and scattered about the room multi-coloured festoons, some of which draped themselves on chandeliers, others on the head of the Chairman.
T.S. Eliot to John Hayward, 19th September 1935
DON’T RETITLE YOUR AUTHOR’S BOOK WHILE THEY ARE AWAY IN ICELAND
Faber invented a bloody title [Look, Stranger! (1936)] while I was away without telling me. It sounds like the work of a vegetarian lady novelist. Will you please call the American edition On This Island.
W.H. Auden to Bennett Cerf, Random House, November 1936
DON’T GET INVOLVED IN THE FICTION LIST
We have no conviction […] that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.
T.S. Eliot, declining George Orwell’s Animal Farm, 13th July 1944
NOTES
There never were two Fabers. When Eliot joined the company in 1926, it was called Faber & Gwyer. But when this partnership was dissolved in 1929, Geoffrey Faber added his name on both sides of the ampersand for balance.
I can’t believe that Eliot came so close to calling somebody a “guy” (in a letter, "The Hollow Men" doesn't count)