The question is meaningless. What evidence do you have that he submitted the work repeatedly to the same potential publishers or periodicals? Submitting a work "repeatedly" to different publishers or periodicals is what authors often have to do. Remember how Harry Potter was rejected by the first dozen publishers Rowling submitted it to? Did Rowling think the result would change for the thirteenth? That doesn't matter; it did.
If nothing changed "from one year to the next" except the name the author submitted the poem(s) under, then it's reasonable to suspect that the name change is what made the difference in how the publishers reacted to it. We might look for other explanations, such as the occurrence of significant world events that gave the work a new relevance; or perhaps the adoption of a "movement" in academic poetry that the work retroactively typifies. In those cases, the author-name change just before critical acceptance could be just a coincidence. But you haven't suggested any such perspective-altering world events or fortuitous stylistic movements applicable to the case at hand. Nor has anyone else.
Which leaves the question, not why did someone think the result would change, but why DID the result change after the submitter's represented name changed to an Asian female sounding one? Double standards?
Probably. But it's not quite that simple after all. Because the same poem continued to be rejected nine more times after the name change. If we model the process as a fixed 3% random chance of acceptance per submission regardless of the author's name, it's got a 30% chance of being rejected the first 40 times, and a 78% chance of being accepted by the 50th time. Unlikely but not extremely so.
Then there's the nature of the poem itself. It's a lot of musings about primarily Western narratives (Greek mythology, Roman history, evolutionary biology, Adam and Eve) in a European landscape. The narrator looks at bumblebees and flowers and sees symbiotic evolution, not some haiku-like allusion to enlightenment or beauty. It's a nerdy poem. Which makes it more interesting to imagine why an Asian woman would be having these thoughts, than why an ordinary Western dude would. It's possible the poet could have had a similar effect by simply beginning the poem with something like: "Yi-Feng Chou thought, 'Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous...'" The point is, in context, the name does affect the meaning of the poem, which makes it invalid to claim that the author's name change was the "only" change to explain the difference (to the extent there was a difference) in how the poem was received.
By the way, IMO, it's not a terrible poem. It's not great either.
