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 snootiness it beats anything I have ever seen", writing in 1944 he referred to it as "possibly the best literary paper we have ever had". The first issue of the magazine, of which 600 copies were printed, included Eliot's The Waste Land. In its first year, it received contributions from Luigi Pirandello, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, E. M. Forster, and W. B. Yeats. Other contributors over the years included Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read, John Middleton Murry, John Gould Fletcher, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Hart Crane. Nine contributions in 1924 and 1925 were made, pseudonymously, by Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who suggested the journal's name.The Criterion became the first English periodical to publish Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry and Jean Cocteau.