The Bollingen Foundation was an educational foundation set up along the lines of a

university press A university press is an academic publishing house specializing in monographs and scholarly journals. Most are nonprofit organizations and an integral component of a large research university. They publish work that has been reviewed by scholars ...

in 1945. It was named after

Bollingen Tower The Bollingen Tower is a structure built by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In appearance, it is a small castle with four towers. It is located in the village of Bollingen on the shore of the ''Obersee'' (upper lake) basin of Lake Zürich. Hist ...

, Carl Jung's country home in

Bollingen, Switzerland Bollingen is a village (''Kirchdorf'') within the municipality of Rapperswil-Jona in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen. Geography The village is located along the northern shore of the upper Lake Zürich (''Obersee'') between Jona and Schmerikon. ...

. Funding was provided by

Paul Mellon Paul Mellon (June 11, 1907 – February 1, 1999) was an American philanthropist and an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of only five people ever designated an "Exemplar of Racing" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall ...

and his wife Mary Conover Mellon. The Foundation became inactive in 1968, and its publications were later re-issued by

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...

History

Initially the foundation was dedicated to the dissemination of Jung's work, which was a particular interest of Mary Conover Mellon.McGuire, William (1982). ''Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past'' (Princeton University Press:Bollingen Series, New Jersey).Bender, Thomas (1982)
"With Love and Money,"
review of ''Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past'' in ''The New York Times'' November 14, 1982. Online version retrieved November 10, 2007. The Bollingen Series of books that it sponsored now includes more than 250 related volumes.
webpage maintained by Princeton University Press. Retrieved November 10, 2007. The Bollingen Foundation also awarded more than 300 fellowships. These fellowships were an important, continuing source of funding for poets like

Alexis Leger Alexis Leger (; 31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975), better known by his pseudonym Saint-John Perse (; also Saint-Leger Leger), was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative i ...

and

Marianne Moore Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Early life Moore was born in Kirkwood, ...

, scholars like

Károly Kerényi Károly (Carl, Karl) Kerényi ( hu, Kerényi Károly, ; 19 January 1897 – 14 April 1973) was a Hungarian scholar in classical philology and one of the founders of modern studies of Greek mythology. Life Hungary, 1897–1943 Károly Ker ...

and Mircea Eliade, artists like

Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several ...

, among many others. The Foundation also sponsored the

A. W. Mellon lectures The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts is an annual public lecture series, hosted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., based on topics in the fine arts. Established in 1949 from an endowed gift from Ailsa Mellon Bruce and her br ...

at the

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...

. In 1948, the foundation donated $10,000 to the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

to be used toward a $1,000

Bollingen Prize The Bollingen Prize for Poetry is a literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.

for the best poetry each year. The Library of Congress fellows, who in that year included T. S. Eliot,

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

and

Conrad Aiken Conrad Potter Aiken (August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) was an American writer and poet, honored with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His published works include poetry, short st ...

, gave the 1949 prize to

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

for his 1948 ''

Pisan Cantos ''The Cantos'' by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a ''canto''. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date ...

''."The Bollingen Prize for Poetry at Yale,"
webpage maintained by Yale University. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2007. Their choice was highly controversial, in particular because of Pound's fascist and anti-Semitic politics. Following the publication of two highly negative articles by

Robert Hillyer Robert Silliman Hillyer (June 3, 1895 – December 24, 1961) was an American poet and professor of English literature. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1934. Early life Hillyer was born in East Orange, New Jersey to an old Connecticut fa ...

in the ''

Saturday Review of Literature ''Saturday Review'', previously ''The Saturday Review of Literature'', was an American weekly magazine established in 1924. Norman Cousins was the editor from 1940 to 1971. Under Norman Cousins, it was described as "a compendium of reportage, ess ...

'', the United States Congress passed a resolution that effectively discontinued the involvement of the Library of Congress with the prize. The remaining funds were returned to the Foundation.McGuire, William (1988)
"Ezra Pound and Bollingen Prize controversy,"
in ''Poetry's Catbird Seat (the consultantship in poetry in the English language at the Library of Congress, 1937-1987)'' (Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.). . Online version retrieved November 10, 2007. In 1950, the

Bollingen Prize The Bollingen Prize for Poetry is a literary honor bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement.

was continued under the auspices of the

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

Library, which awarded the 1950 prize to

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

. In 1968, the Foundation became inactive. It was largely subsumed into the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

, which continued funding of the Bollingen Prize. The Bollingen Series was given to

to carry on and complete. Over its lifetime, the Bollingen Foundation had expended about $20 million. Thomas Bender has written,

Bollingen Series

A great many texts that were issued in the original Pantheon Books version of the Bollingen Series and in early editions by Princeton University Press are now out of print. The Princeton Press site does not provide a comprehensive list, and is missing some of the key texts in the series and some of the grandest in vision, ''e.g.'' The Egyptian Religious Texts series. A list of the works in the series, complete to 1982, appears as an appendix to William McGuire's book, pp. 295–309. The list below is based on McGuire's list and information appearing in the individual volumes, with help from th
Princeton site
and fro

Numbers 1 to 34

Number 35: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

This is the only part of the Bollingen Series that continues to produce new volumes.

Numbers 36 to 100

References

External links

Bollingen Foundation Collection
at the

{{Authority control Educational foundations in the United States Series of books Classics publications