I think it's down to the cosmic originality of the pretend universe we construct when setting out up the career pole. Poetic self-respect isn't conferred by anyone else, but our mind alone, and an editor is only one person. Their opinion, is exactly that. Even the best choose chaff over wheat. Yeats as editor of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, most agree was just him logrolling his mates from the pub.
And Heaney says you only respect those whose work you respect. So if a poet submits to someone whose work they believe inferior to their own and they reject them, this can lead to tears in Nearys, a set to in the Dukes, a heated exchange in McDaids, or a punch up in the Palace over the politics behind being excluded from a rag.
Poets' egos are second only to third world dictators and the prophets of rock 'n roll who save the world from Whelans, and really, what does it mean to be "published"? I publish all day long, and stopped sending out when Maura Kennedy published me in the Galway Arts Centre e-zine, after getting my work in about ten various rags, as i saw it as a game, steps of a process rather than a final affirmation.
Learn the craft first and then publish. Literally thousands of poetry collections are published each year, most sell next to zilch, so it's essentially a vanity game anyway.
There is an interesting article Ron Silliman led me too, about 12 first timers getting books out. One said:
"I felt frocked on the outside, and fraudulent on the inside.."
one measures success:
"..less..(on) .. sales numbers and awards and more (by).. human responses.."
http://www.pw.org/mag/0711/larimer.htm
The ouldest trick is to get good on one's own terms. Let instinct create your own rules of engagement and don't measure success against how well one's rival bores appear to be doing. Get people gassing about yer by developing critical prose and demolishing big names with it. Then pull out a royal flush, just for the sheer heck of it..