Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound

Der Atlantic vergleicht die Nobelpreisverleihung an V.S. Naipaul mit einer amerikanischen Ehrung für Ezra Pound:

A group of eminent American writers appointed by the Librarian of Congress—including W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lowell—awarded the 1948 Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound , for The Pisan Cantos . Because Pound had spent the war broadcasting propaganda for Mussolini, and was at the time in a mental hospital, having been judged unfit to stand trial for treason, the award not surprisingly caused a storm of protest, even though the judges insisted that they had taken as their guiding principle only „that objective perception of value on which any civilized society must rest,“ and denied that their decision had any political significance. Dwight Macdonald disagreed: the award was political, not to say „the brightest political act in a dark period,“ precisely because the judges had rebuked totalitarianism, whose worst horror is that it „reduces the individual to one aspect, the political … and I think we can take some pride as Americans in having as yet preserved a society free and ‚open‘ enough for it to happen.“ / The Atlantic , Feb. 2002