SOURCE: Viereck, Peter. “Pure Poetry, Impure Politics, and Ezra Pound: The Bollingen Prize Controversy Revisited.” In A Casebook on Ezra Pound, edited by William Van O'Connor and Edward Stone, pp. 92-103. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1959.

In the following essay, originally published inCommentary's April 1951 issue, Viereck debates whether “form and technique can be considered apart from context and meaning” by examining Pound's awarding of the 1949 Bollingen Prize for poetry.

Not even Ezra Pound's most intolerant belittlers have ever been able to deny his trail-blazing function, whether or not one likes his trails. Therefore one wonders what his feelings must be at watching his pious, humorless disciples—for example, in the recent symposium An Examination of Ezra Pound—turn his rebellious originality into a frozen image as stereotyped as that of the Georgians and late-Victorians whom he overthrew. The contrast between his vitality in the 1920's...