The New Criterion

We sometimes wish Thanksgiving came in June. That way we could synchronize that important national holiday and collective opportunity to express gratitude for blessings received with our end-of-season tribute to those who make The New Criterion possible. We understood from the beginning that an enterprise that combined uncompromising critical standards with a keen awareness of the fragility of cultural achievement would be difficult to sustain. For one thing, although The New Criterion might be influential, it could never be popular. Indeed, it could neither be popular in the sense of appealing to a mass audience—for its concern with the monuments of Western civilization would naturally circumscribe its appeal—nor could it be popular in the sense of pandering to the windy, politically correct pieties that define establishment taste today. T. S. Eliot, in many ways the tutelary genius who inspired The New Criterion, ...

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