Criterion, The

a periodical founded with the financial support of Lady Rothermere in 1922 by T. S. Eliot, who remained its editor until the final issue in 1939. Eliot's first wife Vivien supplied the title. The Waste Land was published in the first issue. The magazine was taken over by the publishers Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) after Eliot joined the firm in 1925. It rapidly gained an unrivalled reputation for literary quality, featuring work by most of the leading writers of the 1920s and encouraging the broad acceptance of Modernism; Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, F. S. Flint, W. B. Yeats, Herbert Read, E. M. Forster, and I. A. Richards were among its early contributors. It also regularly featured writing by a range of eminent European authors. In 1924 Eliot began his editorial commentaries, which tended to reflect his increasingly extreme conservative position on socio-cultural matters and his sense of communism's threat to the European tradition. Nevertheless, the Criterion remained open to conflicting shades of opinion and printed work by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Hugh MacDiarmid, and others known for their socialist sympathies during the early 1930s. A collected edition of its seventy-one issues appeared in 1967, with a preface by Eliot expressing his satisfaction with its overall achievement.