...a subtle change that relaxes the statement...

Clashes between New Yorker poets and facts have been constant. "The checking department says it should be 'strait' not straits,'" Katharine S. White wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in 1945, about the first line of "Large Bad Picture." "But if you prefer the sound of the latter I don't think we need to be too literal." Bishop, we learn in the new volume of correspondence between the poet and The New Yorker, yielded to most editorial requests, and this time was no different.

"It's good to have a standard," said Alice Quinn, formerly the poetry editor at The New Yorker and the caretaker of the Bishop legacy. "Accuracy was one of the three qualities Bishop strove for: accuracy, mystery and spontaneity."

It was copy editors, though, who made their mark on Bishop's most famous poem, changing a colon to a semi-colon in Bishop's "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master;"), a subtle change that relaxes the statement rather than making it a declaration. In general, grammatical mistakes—whether intentional or accidental—are tolerated far less than unfounded facts.

—Michael H. Miller, "Whose Line Is It, Anyway?" The New York Observer, Daily Transom (Feb. 16, 2011)