SOURCE: Coley, Lem. “‘A Conspiracy of Friendliness’: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, and the Bollingen Controversy.” The Southern Review 38, no. 4 (autumn 2002): 809-26.

In the following essay, Coley summarizes the events surrounding Pound's selection for the Bollingen Award and gives the opinions of many of the leading literary figures of the period and on which side of the debate they fell on.

In 1948 the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress announced the creation of a new prize for poetry: one thousand dollars for the best book published by an American citizen during the previous year. The prize would be called the Bollingen Award because the Mellon family's Bollingen Foundation was putting up the money. In February 1949, the Fellows announced that Ezra Pound had won the first award for Pisan Cantos.

From its conception and design to its contentious denouement, the first Bollingen Award owed...