When Peter Usborne, the children’s publisher, died earlier this year his daughter Nicola, who is his successor, said, ‘He was always going to be involved until the very end. He was a pretty amazing boss. Of course, his plan was never to die.’

Of course, his plan was never to die. I know people like that.

His publishing business began in the same year as PN Review whose editor shares Usborne’s plan, even though for at least the last dozen years ‘succession planning’ has been an agenda item at every Carcanet/PN Review board meeting, a nod in the direction of the unpunctual Reaper. The SWOT analysis we produce for the audit foregrounds the general editor as the strength, weakness, opportunity and threat of the operation.

When I discovered, due to a careless leak, that a celebration of the magazine and its editor, in the form of a supplement, was planned for this issue, to be insinuated into it without me knowing, I was alarmed, though also moved in a dozen ways – to gratitude for the initiative of my fellow editors; for the rich content of the supplement, which I saw in proof; and to a sense of puzzlement. Is the fact that someone has stuck in the same job for fifty years a matter of celebration or ought it not rather to be an occasion for pity: how lazy he must be never to have ventured into the wider world, how little imagination he must have to mark the biggest revolutions in his life by an adjustment of the cover design or an alteration in formatting.

Other more self-forgiving thoughts followed: that the magazine has always been (and continues to be) a collaboration between me and named and unnamed co-editors, several of them generous contributors to the supplement in this issue and dear friends old and new. The supplement is full of anecdotes which remind me that few days passed without intellectual engagement and conflict, few without laughter. And it struck me that the ‘I’ who is writing this editorial note is not the same ‘I’ who pompously wrote the first, in his best impersonal voice, fifty years ago:

The need has arisen in the last few years for a magazine that expresses and explores the growing consensus among poets and readers of poetry – a consensus which can be traced in the critical writing of authors as different as John Bayley, Donald Davie, and Terry Eagleton; in the poetries of Charles Tomlinson, Geoffrey Hill, C. H. Sisson, Philip Larkin, and others. There is a renewed popularity and practice of clearly formal writing, a common bridling at vacuous public and private rhetoric, and at the same time a refusal – confronted with the variety and rich potential of new poetic modes – to surrender catholicity and assume the too readily available stance of the embattled poet or critic. The writers who most interest us as editors differ widely in their views of what the ends of poetry should be, but a substantial agreement exists in their view of the means: the necessary intelligence that must be brought to the poetic act (whether of writing or of reading), the shaping of adequate forms, and, equally important, the responsibilities to a vital linguistic and formal heritage, to a living language, to a living community.

That same ‘I’ was soon to learn that the Republic of Letters (which the title Poetry Nation was intended to evoke, rather than a narrowly English focus) included women, and writers from other Englishes and different ethnicities, and wrested into English from other languages (not just the Classics). Some of the jolts that altered the direction of the editorial ‘I’ may have begun with John Ash, who led to John Ashbery and the wide wake he drew behind him; it included Sujata Bhatt, who opened my ears to other Englishes, and Eavan Boland and her advocacies. And it continued from there. My love for the poets and prose writers I started from editorially remains undiminished, but I now love poets – poetries – they would and could never have done.

The I who writes this editorial is uncomfortable in the company of the ur-I, author of that first one. An old man refuses to revise his youthful work because the young man he was would have hated the old man he has become as much as the old man resents the youth he was. Resent is too strong a word. Comprehends might be better, because he sees, as the young man could not, all the wrong turnings and wrong decisions taken. But there are also in the rich archive of this magazine an abundance of right directions, many astonishments, discoveries, and, most remarkably, rediscoveries. Readers should never stop looking over their shoulders, or forget that they have two shoulders to look over, even as they proceed gingerly along the road of the present which is scarily deep in things that describe themselves as poems. One might one day get lost in a drift of them.