fifteen thousand

In 1956, Eliot lectured on “The Function of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people. “I do not believe,” he remarked afterward, “there are fifteen thousand people in the entire world who are interested in criticism.”

—Joseph Epstein, "T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture"
commentarymagazine.com (November 2010)