Bollingen Prize in Poetry

Bollingen Prize in Poetry, established (1948) by the Bollingen Foundation, financed by Paul Mellon and named by him for the Swiss home of the psychoanalyst Jung. The award $1000 to 1960, $2500 to 1964, $5000 thereafter) was given annually for the highest achievement in American poetry issued the preceding year, but became a biennial award after 1963. The first award (1949), to Pound's Pisan Cantos, recommended by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress, precipitated a controversy spearheaded by Robert Hillyer and led the Library to discontinue all prizes under its auspices. The Prize has since been administered by the Yale University Library and later winners are Wallace Stevens (1950), J.C. Ransom (1951), Marianne Moore (1952), MacLeish and W.C. Williams (1953), Auden (1954), Léonie Adams and Louise Bogan (1955), Aiken (1956), Tate (1957), Cummings (1958), Roethke (1959), Delmore Schwartz (1960), Yvor Winters (1961), J.H. Wheelock and R. Eberhart (1962), Frost (1963), Horace Gregory (1965), R.P. Warren (1967), Berryman and Karl Shapiro (1969), Richard Wilbur and Mona Van Duyn (1971), James Merrill (1973), A.R. Ammons (1975), David Ignatow (1977), W.S. Merwin (1979), Howard Nemerov and May Swenson (1981), Anthony Hecht and John Hollander (1983), John Ashbery and Fred Chappell (1985), Stanley Kunitz (1987), Edgar Bowers (1989), Laura Riding Jackson and Donald Justice (1991), Mark Strand (1993), and Kenneth Koch (1995).