T. S. Eliot dated the beginning of his ‘adult life’ to the period ‘marked by The Waste Land, and the foundation of The Criterion, and the development of relations with men of letters in the several countries of Europe.’ Eliot would edit The Criterion for its entire lifespan (1922–1939): the periodical advanced his literary and social career; it was an outlet for his poetry and criticism; and, during the crisis-ridden 1930s, it was a platform for outspoken interventions in the major social and political issues of the day. Furthermore, Eliot used The Criterion to promote what he called ‘the European idea – the idea of a common culture of western Europe’ – and as a venue to introduce the work of young British and American poets, fiction writers and intellectuals to a select but highly influential audience. Many contributors to The Criterion were recruited by Eliot to become Faber authors. Throughout its life, the editor wanted his periodical to be an open forum: it often staged symposia and engaged in controversies with rival magazines. The Criterion was therefore never a straightforward vehicle for Eliot’s own opinions.

Founding a Critical Review

In the summer of 1921, Eliot was approached by representatives of Lady Rothermere, the estranged wife of Viscount Rothermere, the wealthy owner of the Daily Mail, who was willing to fund a London magazine. According to Eliot, Lady Rothermere wanted a ‘chic’ publication of literature and the arts, along the lines of Arts and Letters: An Illustrated Quarterly, which had folded in 1920. Eliot’s ambitions were very different, and his letters to potential contributors reveal a desire to edit a quarterly review ‘simple and severe in appearance, without illustrations, and my only ambition is that it should unite the best critical opinion in England, together with the work of the best critics I can find from other countries.’ Eliot was resolute and the publisher Cobden-Sanderson produced a dignified, beige octavo, its cover sporting the magisterial title – apparently chosen by Eliot’s wife, Vivienne – printed in expensive red vertical type with the table of contents below, in black. In appearance, The Criterion closely resembled the cosmopolitan Parisian monthly of high standing, La Nouvelle Revue française, for which Eliot was then London correspondent. Although The Criterion paid its contributors, initially it carried no advertisements – indicative of an aim, not for commercial success, but for succès d’estime – and was sold at three shillings and sixpence (the cost of a clothbound pocket edition of a popular novel). Publicity drawn up in advance of publication positioned The Criterion as a successor to the Victorian higher journalism rather than as a nest of avant-garde extremists.

The Criterion: A Quarterly Review (1922–1925)

On 15 October 1922, Cobden-Sanderson published 600 copies of the ninety-six-page first number of The Criterion. At its heart was The Waste Land – without epigraph or notes – cushioned by gentlemanly essays from an older generation, George Saintsbury and Thomas Sturge Moore, set alongside Hermann Hesse’s reflections on post-war German poetry and Valery Larbaud’s lecture on James Joyce’s experimental novel Ulysses. The somewhat Janus-faced relation of The Criterion to the London literary establishment reflected the simultaneous desire to detonate avant-garde incendiaries while laying down judgements of a reassuring authority. The early volumes published poetry from Ezra Pound, drama from W. B. Yeats, a section of Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, translations from Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, Luigi Pirandello and C. P. Cavafy, essays from Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Ernst Robert Curtius, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and pioneering observations on contemporary poetry from the Cambridge academic I. A. Richards, who made the assertion (later disputed by Eliot) that The Waste Land ‘effected a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs.’

Eliot employed Richard Aldington as an assistant editor at a modest salary to proof-read contributions and to oversee, through his contacts, an array of reviews of Foreign Periodicals. Aldington, who was jealous of Eliot’s rising star, proved troublesome: he withdrew from his editorial position by the end of 1923. Although assisted by Vivienne and by a part-time secretary, Irene Fassett, who dealt with the voluminous correspondence, The Criterion struck Eliot as an onerous undertaking. In October 1923, he wrote to his New York patron John Quinn in tones of despair: ‘I wish to heaven that I had never taken up the Criterion. … I am worn out, I cannot go on.’ And yet, in its fledgling years, a period when Eliot was determined to establish the journal’s reputation, The Criterion witnessed the publication of his memorial for the music-hall artiste Marie Lloyd, ‘The Function of Criticism’ and an essay on Elizabethan stage conventions. The Waste Land, which had been typeset in proof as two parts before a last-minute decision saw it appear whole in one issue, was followed by parts of what was later titled ‘The Hollow Men’. The source of the sententious ironies signed ‘Crites’ – Eliot’s pseudonym was designed to mask this unpaid employment from his employers at Lloyds Bank – was an open secret in literary London. Even Vivienne Eliot’s breezy prose sketches of society life – cloaked under a variety of pen-names – betrayed in their allusions signs of collaboration with her husband.

Still, detractors of The Criterion complained that Eliot’s editorial hand failed to provide the quarterly with a definite programme: some readers, notably Ezra Pound, thought the magazine was too cautiously conservative, others doubtless found it too modernist for their taste. In the autumn of 1924, Eliot explained to Herbert Read, a loyal aide-de-camp: ‘I wish, certainly, to get as homogeneous a group as possible: but I find that homogeneity is in the end indefinable: for the purposes of the Criterion, it cannot be reduced to a creed of numbered capitals ... What is essential is to find those persons who have an impersonal loyalty to some faith not antagonistic to my own.’

The Criterion was an eclectic not a sectarian magazine, even if it did publish work that exemplified an editorial bias, some of it reflecting the gossipy intrigues spread in literary circles. In the story ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’, published in 1924, D. H. Lawrence skewered a thinly-veiled John Middleton Murry, editor of The Adelphi, who had publicly challenged The Criterion on the respective merits of romanticism and classicism. Earlier that year, Eliot had permitted Wyndham Lewis to satirise his Bloomsbury acquaintances in The Criterion, fuelling Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s suspicions that Eliot could, at times, be a ‘queer shifty creature’.

In spite of the excellence of its best creative writing and critical essays, or the fashionable articles on ballet, art, theatre and music, Lady Rothermere found the contents of her magazine dull rather than dazzling. The Criterion struggled to achieve a durable readership of 1000 (just 200 were subscribers); meagre in comparison to the circulation of J. C. Squire’s middlebrow London Mercury (10,000) or the Times Literary Supplement (20,000). In 1925, as Lady Rothermere’s three-year contract with Cobden-Sanderson expired, The Criterion, plagued by the Eliots’ chronic ill-health, was starting to founder. The magazine was rescued when Eliot was appointed a director at Faber & Gwyer. In the summer of 1925, a deal was negotiated with Lady Rothermere whereby The Criterion would be reorganised on a more business-like footing, transferring publication of the quarterly to the more economical Faber imprint. Lady Rothermere’s subsidy would continue but the journal would also be cross-subsidised by the revenue from Faber & Gwyer’s high-circulation Nursing Mirror (packed with lucrative advertising) in order that Eliot could at last receive an editorial salary. To pay its way, Faber calculated that The Criterion must double its sales figures.

The New Criterion: A Quarterly Review (1926–1927)

In January 1926, Eliot launched The New Criterion with the institutional backing of Faber & Gwyer. It was a bumper 220-page issue, selling at five shillings, carrying a handful of up-market advertisements and original writing by Lawrence, Woolf, Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley and Gertrude Stein. Eliot’s essay, ‘The Idea of a Literary Review’, was a curious editorial manifesto identifying classicism as a guiding ‘modern tendency’ for his contributors. He illustrated this tendency with a list of texts – books by Georges Sorel, Charles Maurras, Julien Benda, T. E. Hulme, Jacques Maritain and Irving Babbitt – whose only discernible common denominator was distaste for liberal democracy. The editors of a vigorous entrant to literary London, The Calendar of Modern Letters, had difficulty in seeing what was classical about Gertrude Stein’s exercise in constitutive stammering, ‘The Fifteenth of November’. The same challenge might be levelled at the two fragments of Eliot’s verse drama Sweeney Agonistes serialised in The New Criterion, or at his batch reviews of recent detective fiction.

From 1926, the Criterion Group, a conclave of civil servants and men of letters who constituted an informal editorial advisory committee, met regularly at the Grove Tavern to discuss matters of policy and finance. In August 1926, Harold Monro sent Eliot a communique signed by the Criterion Group urging the transformation of The Criterion into an up-to-date monthly with a stronger editorial line and ‘the best short reviews in Great Britain’ – a reaction to the impact of the monthly Calendar of Modern Letters, which published trenchant short reviews written by a close-knit team of iconoclastic younger critics. Eliot passed Monro’s recommendations to Geoffrey Faber, for whom the question of monthly versus quarterly publication was predominantly a financial one.

The Monthly Criterion: A Literary Review (1927–1928)

The Monthly Criterion proclaimed Eliot’s name as editor on its mustard-yellow cover. The new frequency altered the character of the journal, accelerating the turnover of contributions, and drawing the Criterion Group into closer collaboration. Another corollary was the imperative to stimulate sales of the monthly’s increased print-run (2500 copies). Eliot stage-managed a series of controversies with those journals he felt shared a ‘common ground for disagreement’. He provoked what Conrad Aiken called a ‘carefully picked quarrel’ with Murry’s Adelphi, seeking to reignite their skirmishes on classical and romantic traditions in European literature. Eliot and Murry colluded by reading each other’s essays before publication – as Murry confided in the pages of Adelphi, in the charmed circle of literary reviews, ‘enemies are necessary to one another’. The financially ailing Calendar redoubled its attacks on The Criterion when their editors accused Eliot of defending a ‘reactionary Latin philosophy’. They had in mind recent Criterion articles by French reactionaries Charles Maurras, Henri Massis and Jacques Maritain (the Bloomsbury critic Desmond MacCarthy lamented how the magazine had become ‘Frenchified’ in this manner). This was regrettable to the extent that it deflected attention from The Monthly Criterion’s triumphs: the flowering of Yeats’s late style in ‘The Tower’; ‘Salutation’, from what later became Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday sequence; and the purgatorial section ‘The Tunnel’ from Hart Crane’s modernist American epic The Bridge. Crane was delighted to have found favour from Eliot’s ‘most exacting critical standards’ (Laura Riding, Basil Bunting and Allen Tate all had their poetry rejected by The Criterion). Unfortunately, however, The Monthly Criterion accrued heavy financial losses. The space devoted to laboured controversies produced a log-jam of contributions and did little to boost sales (which peaked at 1200 copies per issue). At the end of 1927, Lady Rothermere, who had lost patience, plunged the monthly into crisis by summoning Eliot to Switzerland to inform him that she was withdrawing her financial backing. Meetings at the Grove Tavern in early 1928 were downbeat as The Criterion wavered on the precipice of extinction. Fortunately, ten private benefactors, including the author May Sinclair, the editor of the TLS Bruce Richmond, pugnacious Tory journalist Charles Whibley and, most generously of all, a conservative political theorist, F. S. Oliver (who pledged £250 per annum for three years), persuaded Faber to maintain The Criterion on a subsidy of £750 per annum as a testing ground and a clearing house for new authors. The oscillation from quarterly to monthly publication and back again was evidence, as Eliot admitted, that The Criterion could not survive without ‘the aid of artificial respiration’.

The Criterion: A Quarterly Review (1928–1939)

For the remainder of its life, The Criterion was sold at what one impecunious young writer, Hugh Gordon Porteus, called the ‘plutocratic’ price of seven shillings and sixpence (the cost of a new novel). In this period, political and economic shockwaves occasioned public responses from Eliot, stretching his original framework for a literary review. The Criterion’s internationalist support for what Hugo von Hofmannsthal had termed the ‘conservative revolution’ – nostalgia for the patrimony of a Latin-Christian tradition – was engulfed in the rise of fascism. Eliot expressed his preference for a nationalist Church-State Toryism, a preference shared by several of his contributors and financial backers. Nevertheless, Bonamy Dobrée, a trusted and valued member of the Criterion Group, privately worried that Eliot’s editorial appearances as an Anglican moralist risked turning The Criterion into a ‘Religio-Political Organ’. A theological slant was increasingly evident during the 1930s. In 1931, Eliot’s signed editorials doubled in length to address issues arising from mass unemployment in Britain and the threat of totalitarianism across Continental Europe. In the climate of the British Government’s policy of appeasement and those passions inflamed by an anti-fascist Popular Front, Eliot’s editorials on polarising issues like the Abyssinian Crisis or the Spanish Civil War, painstaking and principled expressions of ‘the just impartiality of a Christian philosopher’, struck many left-wing observers as infuriatingly evasive.

If Eliot repeatedly warned his readers against the ‘Russian religion’ of Communism, The Criterion was not blind to the menace of National Socialism: an article by Thomas Mann published after Hitler’s large gains in the 1930 German elections, together with Eliot’s editorial praise of his friend Ernst Robert Curtius’s humanist critique of Nazi ideology, and reinforced by Reverend Edward Quinn’s theological condemnation of Nazi racial theories as un-Christian (published when war with Germany seemed imminent), all refute accusations that The Criterion was proto-fascist. After Chamberlain’s pact with Hitler, Eliot used his final editorial (‘Last Words’) to condemn capitalist-industrial Britain for lacking sufficient moral conviction to face up to the sacrifices demanded by the grim political situation, engendering ‘a depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion’.

The austerity of the quarterly review in its last phase was evident in heavy chronicles on fiction and foreign literatures, on art, music, drama and broadcasting, which constituted a retreat from the experimental writing championed in avant-garde magazines like transition. During the 1930s Eliot’s contributions, whether poetry or criticism, were often disappointing. Pound disparaged The Criterion’s ‘diet of dead crow’ and a Cambridge quarterly, Scrutiny, scolded a weakness to ‘substitute solemnity for seriousness’. Neither Pound nor Scrutiny’s inner circle were admirers of the Auden generation (F. R. Leavis dubbed them ‘Public School Communists’). The Criterion’s publication of the poetry of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice – each of whom became a major Faber poet – along with work by Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Kathleen Raine, William Empson (who also published extracts of his critical theory) and a Scottish Communist Hugh MacDiarmid, ensured it continued to be a prestigious venue for new poetry. From 1934, Michael Roberts and his wife Janet Adam Smith were granted complete freedom to review the volumes of poetry sent to their family home in Newcastle. Roberts and Adam Smith were respected, uncompromising reviewers. Their consecration of fresh talents in The Criterion was buttressed by Roberts’s canon-making Faber Book of Modern Verse in 1936. At business lunches and teas, Eliot commissioned young authors of the calibre of Samuel Beckett, Isaiah Berlin and Jacob Bronowski to review for the Books of the Quarter section of The Criterion, which had swollen to eighty pages of each 200-page issue. Many reviewers were anxious to graduate to the ranks of Faber. Hugh Sykes Davies, who appeared in The Criterion as a surrealist and as a classical scholar, recalled Eliot’s ‘diligence, courtesy, and personal concern for the recruiting of young writers, for exploring the temper of their generation, and encouraging them to put as good a face as possible on being themselves.’

Last Words

In his valedictory ‘Last Words’, Eliot remarked that ‘The Criterion has brought me associations, friendships and acquaintanceships of inestimable value; I like also to think that it may have served contributors, by initiating friendships and acquaintances between those who might not otherwise have met, or known each other’s work.’ The Criterion assembled a remarkable constellation of contributors. Sceptics questioned its overall coherence and antagonists complained of the patrician editorial tone it took in controversies. None of Eliot’s sixty-six topical editorials were included in Selected Essays, and they could sound ponderously conservative in the midst of the alarming, often feverish, political arena of the 1930s. Ultimately, the defence of Latin-Christian civilization was punctured by the turmoil in foreign affairs. Eliot was correct to close down The Criterion on the eve of the Second World War, when concerns about attracting copy, advertising, and paper no longer made it commercially sustainable for Faber. The circulation of the quarterly had dwindled to an exiguous 600, with many annual subscriptions taken by university libraries rather than private individuals, an indication that The Criterion had acquired some characteristics of an establishment institution. In the autumn of 1938, Geoffrey Grigson’s waspish New Verse published a mock obituary of Eliot, but when a few months later ‘Last Words’ announced that The Criterion was to end, Grigson offered a more temperate obituary: ‘It disappointed all those who wished it to be better than its best numbers, but … we can think that from The Criterion next to no English writer of value was ever excluded. … [I]t has faded away like a biennial after its seeds have matured and been dispersed.’ It was never popular, and yet The Criterion, observing the law of the best modernist magazines, exerted an influence on contemporary letters out of all proportion to its circulation.