In May 1949, the American journal, Partisan Review, carried a contribution by George Orwell to the controversy surrounding the award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Ezra Pound earlier that year. Pound's fascist sympathies, his violent anti-Semitism and his wartime collaboration inevitably called into question the judges' decision so soon after the war. In his contribution, Orwell argued that as far as he was concerned if Pound's poetry was judged deserving of the prize then it should be awarded to him regardless of his politics. Nevertheless, he went on to insist that 'one ought to keep Pound's career in memory and not feel that his ideas are made respectable by the mere fact of winning a literary prize'. Pound, he pointed out, was 'an ardent follower of Mussolini . . . and never concealed it'. His embrace of fascism was quite open and unashamed, although Orwell believed that his underlying motivation was, in fact, hatred of Britain and the United States, and more particularly, of 'the Jews'. Pound's wartime broadcasts for fascist Italy 'were disgusting' and Orwell remembered 'at least one in which he approved the massacre of the East European Jews and “warned” the American Jews that their turn was coming presently'. If the murder of the Jews 'in the gas vans' had still been going on, then the decision to award Pound the prize would have been 'undesirable', but this was no longer the case. If the judges believed Pound's poetry worthy of the prize then he should receive it, but, Orwell went on, they should have stated 'more firmly' that Pound's political opinions were 'evil'. The very deliberate use of the word 'evil' here is quite unusual in Orwell's writings. He made the point in an aside that he personally thought Pound's poetry 'entirely spurious'.