Ezra Pound v. The Saturday Review of Literature

"Of course we just printed the Hillyer articles and the editorial to start a controversy. It was a great success. We thought it would give us three exciting issues but it went on for six."

—Harrison Smith (president of the Saturday Review) to Malcolm Cowley

On Sunday, 20 February 1949, the New York Times printed as its front-page headline: "Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell." It was no surprise that the choice of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos for the new Bollingen Award in Poetry by the Fellows of the Library of Congress would be controversial. At the time, Pound was at St. Elizabeths mental institution, to which he had been confined since 1946, ever since he had been found unfit to stand trial for the charge of treason resulting from the fascist broadcasts that he had given over Rome Radio during World War II. Newspapers throughout the country offered critical editorials and printed letters from readers in support and/or protest of the award. Just as the debates began to wane, The Saturday Review of Literature published two paranoid and hyperbolic attacks on Pound by Robert Hillyer on 11 and 18 June 1949, which received considerable publicity. In August, Congress decided that the government should not sponsor any awards in the arts (several were cancelled or relocated as a result), and the Bollingen award for poetry was moved to Yale University.

These facts are well known. What is missing in this account is the deliberately manipulative role that the editors of the Saturday Review played in exacerbating this debate and alerting Congress to the strategically exaggerated argument put forth in their own periodical. Furthermore, standard accounts of the events surrounding the award have neglected the complicated negotiations of the Fellows in their decision to give Pound the award, as well as their varied reactions to the Saturday Review scandal. Ultimately, the editors of the Saturday Review and the Fellows agreed that a most important democratic principle was at stake. But they disagreed as to the extent this democratic principle was visible and relevant in the debate .

Initially, most discussions of the award focused on the anti-Semitic content of the Pisan Cantos. The Partisan Review asked in April 1949: "How far is it possible, in a lyric poem, for technical embellishment to transform vicious and ugly matter into beautiful poetry?" ¹ The journal's following issue contained a symposium with responses that focused on this question from Fellows W.H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, and Allen Tate as well as other intellectuals, including Irving Howe and George Orwell. ² As the middle-brow and more conservative Saturday Review began to publish letters from readers about the controversy, it became apparent not only that many Americans were outraged that the racist poetry of Pisan Cantos was given an award, but also that certain readers objected to the impertinence of a self-selected, domineering, and closed group of poets in choosing one of their own friends—even though he was a Fascist and possible traitor. These readers felt that a committee appointed by the Library of Congress should represent the general public opinion in their selection; that is, they thought that their own choice should be recognized as the winner. According to these voices, the committee (T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Garrison Chapin, Willard Thorp, Paul Green, Louise Bogan, Conrad Aiken, Karl Shapiro, Theodore Spencer) represented an elite group whose esoteric and high-brow literary ideals suppressed poets who presented an accessible poetics that was valued by many Americans. ³ Many readers diverted their wrath from Pound to Eliot and the New Criticism, as Thomas Daniel Young observes: "Giving one of the nation's most prestigious literary awards to an avowed fascist merely provided the occasion for Robert Hillyer and many other discontented literary journalists and commentators to...