Just four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a panel of literary luminaries awarded the newly established Bollingen Prize for the best volume of American poetry to “The Pisan Cantos.”
The author, Ezra Pound, had spent the war in Italy broadcasting Fascist propaganda. Pound’s raw anti-Semitism was a feature of his radio work, and the prize-winning cantos begin with a lamentation for Mussolini. But the book was published anyway, and the Bollingen judges insisted that to allow anything other than “poetic achievement” to influence their decision “would destroy the significance of the award.”
