In 1923, early in the career of The Criterion, T. S. Eliot wrote that

it is the function of a literary review to maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature, and at the same time to exhibit the relations of literature—not to “life,” as something contrasted to literature, but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life.

Eliot noted that the focus of such a review would be “not merely on literature, but on what we suppose to be the interests of any intelligent person with literary taste,” that is to say, on the realm of culture writ large. Eliot’s dual ambition—to protect the native freedom of art and culture while at the same time fostering their manifold attachments and responsibilities—has also always been at the center of our ambition at The New Criterion.

Today, as in the Twent ...

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