The editor William Earnest Henley set high literary standards; his printer Walter
Blaikie produced beautifully typeset issues; and his contributors enjoyed the
freedom of publishing high-quality work without editorial amputation or undue
intervention.
“Instead, it is the editorial acumen of Henley that strikes
readers almost a century later. He had the courage to sponsor the still young
and obscure W.B. Yeats, eighteen of whose poems and several of whose tales were
first printed in the Observer. Henley had the charisma to attract and to retain
Rudyard Kipling.... Furthermore, other significant poets — A.C. Swinburne,
Robert Louis Stevenson” (Hughes, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out").
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