Warding off the barbarians

Counterpoints: 25 Years of ‘The New Criterion’ on Culture and the Arts
edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer

The 40 or so reviews and essays in this book celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of the New Criterion. It saw itself as the heir of T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. In 1922 Eliot wrote that his contributors sought to foster ‘a common concern for the highest standards of both thought and expression’. This was to echo Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism as the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world and to protect it from the onslaught of philistine barbarians. For the writers of the New Criterion modern criticism fails to live up to this task.

Take the case of Sir Elton John. Social historians will long take an interest in him as a phenomenon of our times, with its cult of Princess Diana whose virtues he celebrated in ‘Candle in the Wind’ at her funeral service.