SOURCE: Hillyer, Robert. “Treason's Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award.” Saturday Review of Literature 32, no. 24 (11 June 1949): 9-11, 28.

In the following essay, Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former president of the Poetry Society of America, heatedly explains why Pound is undeserving of the 1949 Bollingen Award for poetry.

Last February 20 the press announced that Ezra Pound, who was then under suspended indictment for high treason, had been awarded a new prize, the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award of ＄1,000. The award was made by “a jury of Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters,” which had adjudged Pound's “Pisan Cantos” to be “the highest achievement of American poetry in 1948.” Except for those facts, the general public, even that part of it which is interested in literary matters, knows little.

It is my purpose in these two articles to provide information concerning the background of...