Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

188 What Thou Lovest Well Remains
think public opinion is going to get very ‘het up’ over E. [at St. Elizabeth’s].
. . . It’s just another place for people to ‘go,’ makes them smug and
pleased with themselves.’’
She was in Rome to meet Ronald Duncan, another ally, the week of
February 16, when Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and
became the center of heated controversy. In 1943, during Archibald Mac-
Leish’s tenure as Librarian of Congress, an annual prize for poetry had
been proposed by Allen Tate, then consultant in poetry at the Library. The
idea was approved under Luther Evans, who succeeded MacLeish, and he
thought at once of the Bollingen Foundation, established in 1945 by philanthropist
Paul Mellon and his wife, Mary Conover, as a source of funds
for the award. The Mellons o√ered a grant of ten thousand dollars, one
thousand of which was to be awarded each year for the best book of verse
published during the preceding year, and a body of Fellows in American
Letters was named to make the selection. On March 4, 1948, the creation of
the Bollingen Prize was announced to the public. A year later, in November
1949 at a meeting of the Fellows at the Cosmos Club, Tate revealed the
unanimous choice for the first award, Pound’s Pisan Cantos, published by
New Directions in 1948.
Evans warned that ‘‘the reaction would be emotional rather than intellectual.’’
And it was—launched by two long articles in Saturday Review by
Robert Hillyer. When the New York Times of February 20 picked up the
story—‘‘Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Prison
Cell’’—Ezra was attacked as pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic in a series
of debates in publications of the era. This continued unabated until August
19, when a joint committee of the U.S. House and Senate ruled that
the Library of Congress should abstain from giving the award, and administration
of the prestigious Bollingen Prize was transferred to the Yale
University Library.
Olga was happy to be out of the fray and back in Sant’Ambrogio. She
installed the first stove in the cottage in early 1949, and lit the fire in the
evening for tea. Other modern conveniences were coming to the hillside
villages, and the newly installed electric lights were more to her liking
than the gloom of the Palazzo Chigi. ‘‘But will he come back here? And
will he want to stay if he does? Or will she find there is someone else? And