The Bollingen Prize, which is presently awarded every two years by Beinecke Library of Yale University, is a prestigious literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.
The prize was established in 1948 by Paul Mellon, and was funded by a $10,000 grant from the Bollingen Foundation to the Library of Congress. Both the prize and the foundation are name...
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The Bollingen Prize, which is presently awarded every two years by Beinecke Library of Yale University, is a prestigious literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.
The prize was established in 1948 by Paul Mellon, and was funded by a $10,000 grant from the Bollingen Foundation to the Library of Congress. Both the prize and the foundation are named after the village of Bollingen, Switzerland, where Carl Jung had a country retreat, the Bollingen Tower. The inaugural prize, chosen by a jury of Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress, was awarded to Ezra Pound for his famous collection of poems entitled The Pisan Cantos. This choice of a work by a committed fascist sympathizer infuriated many people in Cold War America, and political pressure led the Congress to end the Library of Congress involvement in the program and return the unused portion of the grant to the...
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