In his essay on the function of the critical quarterly, Allen Tate was moved to remark, “The great magazines have been edited by autocrats.” Among so many editors and their fiefdoms—Harriet Shaw Weaver’s The Egoist, Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, Marianne Moore’s The Dial, John Crowe Ransom’s The Fugitive, Lincoln Kirstein’s Hound and Horn, Eugene Jolas’s Transition—the greatest autocrat was unquestionably T. S. Eliot. Allen Tate spoke for the majority of his contemporaries when he averred that Eliot’s Criterion “has been the best quarterly of our time.”

The story of The Criterion begins with the death of The Egoist in 1919. Eliot had served as its assistant editor for two years; now he wanted to found a journal that “should unite the best critical opinion in England, together with the work of the best critics who I can find from other countries.” Eliot did not have the money for such a venture; indeed, he feared losing his job at Lloyds Bank so much that he kept his role in The Criterion a secret. (Richard Aldington was later paid to serve as assistant editor and the public face of the quarterly.) In 1921, he was introduced to Lillian Rothermere, the estranged wife of the Daily Mailowner Lord Rothermere—a notorious Nazi sympathizer later in life. It appears that Lady Rothermere was an admirer of his poetry, and that she wished to finance