ABSTRACT
T.S. Eliot, who first published the charade in the ‘Criterion’, evidently placed a high value on its literary and dramatic qualities, for he wrote to his friend E. McKnight Kauffer on 6 January 1930,
I have sent you the new ‘Criterion’, to ask you to read a verse play ‘Paid on Both Sides’, by a young man I know, which seems to me quite a brilliant piece of work. I should like to know whether you think the Gate Theatre would consider it – and first whether you like it yourself. This fellow is about the best poet that I have discovered in several years. (Letter in the Pierpont Morgan Library, quoted by permission of Mrs. Valerie Eliot; a shorter extract appears in B.C. Bloomfield and Edward Mendelson, ‘W.H. Auden: A Bibliography’, p. 3)
