The New Criterion

The New Criterion

Editor and publisher	Roger Kimball
Categories	Literary magazine
Frequency	Monthly
Circulation	10,000[1]
Publisher	Foundation for Cultural Review
Year founded	1982
Country	United States
Based in	New York City, New York
Language	English
Website	newcriterion.com
ISSN	0734-0222

The New Criterion is a New York–based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Roger Kimball (editor and publisher) and James Panero (executive editor). It has sections for criticism of poetry, theater, art, music, the media, and books. It was founded in 1982 by Hilton Kramer, former art critic for The New York Times, and Samuel Lipman, a pianist and music critic. The name is a reference to The Criterion, a British literary magazine edited by T. S. Eliot from 1922 to 1939.

The magazine describes itself as a "monthly review of the arts and intellectual life ... in the forefront both of championing what is best and most humanely vital in our cultural inheritance and in exposing what is mendacious, corrosive, and spurious."^[2] It evinces an artistic classicism and political conservatism that are rare among other publications of its type.^[3][4]

It regularly publishes "special pamphlets", or compilations of published material organized into themes. Some past examples have been Corrupt Humanitarianism; Religion, Manners, and Morals in the U.S. and Great Britain; and Reflections on Anti-Americanism.

Since 1999, The New Criterion has been running the New Criterion Poetry Prize, a poetry contest with a cash prize. In 2004, The New Criterion contributors began publishing a blog, known as Dispatch (previously known as ArmaVirumque).

Origin[]

The New Criterion was founded in 1982 by The New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer. He cited his reasons for leaving the paper to start The New Criterion as "the disgusting and deleterious doctrines with which the most popular of our Reviews disgraces its pages", as well as "the dishonesties and hypocrisies and disfiguring ideologies that nowadays afflict the criticism of the arts, [which] are deeply rooted in both our commercial and our academic culture." He went on to say: "It is therefore all the more urgent that a dissenting critical voice be heard, and it is for the purpose of providing such a voice that The New Criterion has been created."^[5]

Kramer's decision to leave The New York Times, where he had been the newspaper's chief art critic, and to start a magazine devoted to ideas and the arts "surprised a lot of people and was a statement in itself", according to Erich Eichmann.^[6]

Contributors to the journal have included Mark Steyn, Roger Scruton, David Pryce-Jones, Theodore Dalrymple, Alexander McCall Smith, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Jay Nordlinger.

In its first issue, dated September 1982, the magazine set out "to speak plainly and vigorously about the problems that beset the life of the artists and the life of the mind in our society" while resisting "a more general cultural drift" that had in many cases, "condemned true seriousness to a fugitive existence".^[6]

Reception[]

According to the conservative publication The New York Sun, for a quarter of a century The New Criterion "has helped its readers distinguish achievement from failure in painting, music, dance, literature, theater, and other arts. The magazine, whose circulation is 6,500, has taken a leading role in the culture wars, publishing articles whose titles are an intellectual call to arms."^[6]

Contributors[]

Since the magazine's founding, many writers, poets, academics, commentators, and politicians - mostly drawn from the conservative end of the political spectrum - have written for it. Contributors include:^{[citation needed]}

Awards[]

Hilton Kramer Fellowship

Since its inauguration in 2013, The New Criterion’s reader-funded^[8] Hilton Kramer Fellowship has been awarded to promising writers with an interest in developing careers as critics.

Edmund Burke Annual Gala

First awarded in 2012, The New Criterion’s Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society is given annually to individuals “who have made conspicuous contributions to the defense of civilization.”^[9]

The publication hosts an annual gala honoring recipients of the award. Edmund Burke Award recipients include:^[10]

• Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State
• Donald Kagan, historian and classicist
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author and activist
• Charles Murray, political scientist
• Philippe de Montebello, former museum director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
• Victor Davis Hanson, military historian, author, and classicist

New Criterion anthologies[]

• Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts, edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer; Ivan R. Dee, 512 pages, (2007). ISBN 1-56663-706-6 ISBN 978-1566637060
• Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the 20th Century, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball; Ivan R. Dee, 477 pages (1995). ISBN 1-56663-069-X ISBN 978-1566630696
• The New Criterion Reader: The First Five Years, edited by Hilton Kramer; Free Press, 429 pages (1988). ISBN 0-02-917641-7 ISBN 978-0029176412

New Criterion books[]

• Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer; Encounter Books, 266 pages (2004). ISBN 1-59403-054-5 ISBN 978-1594030543
• The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball; Ivan R. Dee, 256 pages (2002). ISBN 1-56663-466-0, ISBN 978-1-56663-466-3
• The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball; Ivan R. Dee, 256 pages (1999). ISBN 1-56663-257-9, ISBN 978-1-56663-257-7
• The Future of the European Past edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball; Ivan R. Dee, 251 pages (1997). ISBN 1-56663-178-5, ISBN 978-1-56663-178-5

The New Criterion Poetry Prize[]

Since 2000 the magazine has been awarding its poetry prize to a poet for "a book-length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form."^[11] The following poets have won the prize:^[12]

• 2021 Nicholas Pierce for In Transit (forthcoming)
• 2020 Bruce Bond for Behemoth (New York: New Criterion, 2021).
• 2019 Ned Balbo for The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New York: New Criterion, 2019).
• 2018 Nicholas Friedman for Petty Theft (New York: New Criterion, 2018).
• 2017 Moira Egan for Synæsthesium (New York: New Criterion, 2017).
• 2016: John Foy for Night Vision (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2016).
• 2015: Michael Spence for Umbilical (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2016).
• 2014: John Poch for Fix Quiet (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2015).
• 2013: Dick Allen for This Shadowy Place (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2014).
• 2012: George Green for Lord Byron's Foot (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2012).
• 2011: D. H. Tracy for Janet's Cottage (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2012).
• 2010: Ashley Anna McHugh, Into These Knots (Lapham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2010).
• 2009: William Virgil Davis, Landscape and Journey (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009).
• 2008: Daniel Brown, Taking the Occasion (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008).
• 2007: J. Allyn Rosser, Foiled Again (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007).
• 2006: Bill Coyle, The God of this World to His Prophet (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).
• 2005: Geoffrey Brock, Weighing Light (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005).
• 2003: Deborah Warren, Zero Meridian (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).
• 2002: Charles Tomlinson, Skywriting and other poems (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).
• 2001: Adam Kirsch, The Thousand Wells (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002).
• 2000: Donald Petersen, Early and Late: Selected poems (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001).

References[]

External links[]

• Official website
• Dispatch, The New Criterion blog