What's My Line

A GOOD DEAL OF PUBLIC AND SCHOLARLY DEBATE HAS BEEN GENERATED BY the Library of Congress involvement in the awarding of the 1949 Bollingen Prize for the best volume of verse published by an American to Ezra Pound. The debate was occasioned by the fact that Pound had been under indictment for treason since 1943 and at the time of the award was a resident of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C.1 A central question in the dispute had to do with the method by which a poem or a poet should be judged, particularly when the issue of national character was involved. How should the Americanness of a poem be measured: by its structure, its content, the combination of structure and content? And what of the poet-should he be evaluated in terms of his skill as a versifier, his moral philosophy or his general social acceptability? The disagreement, which raged largely in the pages of the Saturday Review of Literature, captured a great deal of national attention. Of equal concern to students of American civilization, however, is the earlier 1946 exchange in the Saturday Review of Literature when Bennett Cerf excluded Ezra Pound's poetry from a Modern Library anthology of great British and American verse. The controversy developed late in 1945 when the New York newspaper PM assigned Charles Norman, recently returned from overseas military duty, to do an article on Pound which would shed light on the whole pressing, fascinating question of the artist's place in society.2 Although Mr

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