February 19, 1949

Mary Conover Brown Mellon, (died 1946) was so impressed with the work of Carl Jung that she influenced her husband, (one of the wealthiest men in America, Paul Mellon) to name a literary foundation after Jung's home. Jung's home was Bollingen Tower, a house he built in Switzerland, in a village named Bollingen.

The Bollingen Prize, for poetry, was one result. The first selection committee included T. S. Eliot, Auden, and Conrad Aiken, a stellar and no doubt decisive group. The first recipient, Ezra Pound, received the prize on February 19, 1949. He was then in St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital. Pound's fascist views may settle the question whether "truth is beauty." Pound was a cat lover, and fed stray cats. Ezra Pound may have been the Old Possum," in Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. (1939).