The Criterion

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

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The Criterion (1922-39) was a quarterly literary review founded and edited from London by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot. It won a distinguished reputation for its critical standards and for its impressive European range of eminent contributors, among whom were W. B. Yeats, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Paul Valéry, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Cocteau, C. P. Cavafy, and Benedetto Croce. It failed to reach a readership much above 1,000, though, and was never a fully viable concern, being kept afloat by benefactors’ subsidies (initially from Lady Rothermere, the estranged wife of a newspaper magnate) and by further support from the publisher Geoffrey Faber, who became Eliot’s employer from 1925. Under successive …

1269 words

Citation: Baldick, Chris. "The Criterion". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 May 2021 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19620, accessed 29 March 2024.]

19620 The Criterion 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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