LISTEN to my 2013 conversation with poet Lee Slonimsky on Elizabeth McFarland, poet and Poetry Editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1948 until that magazine stopped publishing verse in 1961. McFarland was married to poet laureate (1973) Daniel Hoffman.
“Elizabeth McFarland was so modest and private a person, she would have been astonished had she known she’d be featured in The New York Times Magazine on Christmas Sunday as one of the most notable persons who died in 2005. She is the only editor in the history of publishing in America who brought into over six million households new work by the most eminent poets—W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Richard Eberhart, Mark Van Doren, Theodore Roethke, John Ciardi, Walter de la Mare— and the then most promising younger ones, among them Maxine Kumin, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, William Jay Smith, William Stafford, and John Updike. This is a service to literary culture not likely to be repeated. From 1948 to 1961 she was Poetry Editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal, where she also published her own romantic, lyrical poems” – Daniel Hoffman essay, “Elizabeth McFarland, “A Poet Who Brought Poetry to the Millions,” Preface, Over the Summer Water: Poems by Elizabeth McFarland, Orchises Press.