New Subject

Last week a sleek, brilliant citizen of the U. S. became a subject of His Britannic Majesty King George V. He is Thomas Stearns Eliot, relative of the late Charles William Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University. Poet and critic, he is the author of The Waste Land, a poem which won the Dial prize for 1922, and The Sacred Wood, a volume of critical works.

Mr. Eliot, now 39 years old, was born in St. Louis. His education was wrought at Harvard, the Sorbonne, the Harvard Graduate School, Merton College, Oxford. During the War, he functioned as assistant editor of The Egoist, recherche London magazine. Today he is editor of The Criterion, a neoteric quarterly of pronounced modernist tendencies.

Although Burton Rascoe thought his The Waste Land a "thing of bitterness and beauty," a nameless London editor pronounced it "an obscure but amusing poem." The reader must judge for himself. But of his brilliance as a critic there can be little doubt, however much his taste may be in dispute.

His many adverse critics, in no wise surprised by his change of nationality, hint that a certain superciliousness in his attitude toward U. S. letters caused him to feel more at home in England, where neo-literary figures abound profuse as the autumnal leaves.