Inception and Controversy
The prize was established in 1948 by Paul Mellon, and was funded by a US$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 Bollingen Foundation in 1949.
Read more about this topic: Bollingen Prize
Famous quotes containing the words inception and/or controversy:
“... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography which marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one’s notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one’s dearest readers.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)