SOURCE: "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," in My Country Right or Left: 1940-43, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. II, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1968, pp. 123-27.

Orwell was an English essayist, journalist, and novelist whose works—including the novels 1984 and Animal Farm—frequently covered political issues. In the following, which was originally broadcast on the BBC Overseas Service in 1941, he argues that English literature beginning in the 1930s sacrificed aesthetics in favor of political didacticism.

I am speaking on literary criticism, and in the world in which we are actually living that is almost as unpromising as speaking about peace. This is not a peaceful age, and it is not a critical age. In the Europe of the last ten years literary criticism of the older kind—criticism that is really judicious, scrupulous, fair-minded, treating a...