Editorializing Englishness: T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, and Interwar National Identity

Abstract T. S. Eliot's interwar literary review, The Criterion, served as his platform for engaging in various streams of English and European cultural-political discourse for 17 years, bringing him unprecedented critical prestige and influence. However, Eliot was not the only opportunistic individual in post-war literary London to vie for such power. The Classicism-Romanticism debate which unfolded between Eliot, as editor of The Criterion, and the editor of The Adelphi, John Middleton Murry, is recognized as one of the most important intellectual exchanges in the development of modernist literary criticism, but that no discursive conclusion was reached between them puzzles scholars to this day. Revisiting the debate with a particular focus upon the previously overlooked national identity politics and questions of editorial ‘personality’ which underpinned its trajectory, this article examines the often intensely nationalistic animosities and culturally exclusionary rhetoric both Eliot and Murry deployed against each other as they battled over not only which of their competing ideals of Englishness would become the modern ‘tendency’, but who would win the authority to ‘editorialize’ on behalf of the ‘mind of England’. By bringing this facet of the debate to the forefront, I offer a new angle for understanding Eliot's rise to the position of ‘arbiter of British opinion’, concluding with a glance at how the conversation regarding English identity politics continued between Eliot and the English-born poets of the Auden generation.