The Criterion The Criterion The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. "The Criterion" (or the "Criterion") was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927–28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S. Eliot who served as its editor for its entire run. Eliot's goal was to make it a literary review dedicated to the maintenance of standards and the reunification of a European intellectual community. Although in a letter to a friend in 1935 George Orwell had said "for pure
T. S. Eliot us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification. With the important exception of "Four Quartets", Eliot directed much of his creative energies after "Ash Wednesday" to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in "The Waste Land". In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He