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The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

and the Serpentine will look just the same and the gulls be as neat on the pond and the sunken garden unchanged and God knows what else is left of our London

— The Pisan Cantos (1948)

James Laughlin of New Directions had Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV, known as The Pisan Cantos, ready for publication in 1946 and gave Pound an advance copy, but Laughlin held back, waiting for the right time to publish. A group of Pound's friends—T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell —met Laughlin in June 1948 to discuss how to get Pound released. They planned to have him awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.

The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released. Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 20 July 1948, and the following February the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin and Karl Shapiro; the latter said he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish himself. Pound had apparently prepared a statement—"No comment from the Bug House"—but decided instead to stay silent.

There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said that poetry cannot "convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry". Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire, not one line, in Pound". Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee. It was the last time the Library of Congress administered the prize.