Prize Package

Now that the Pulitzer Poetry Prize has been conferred on curly-headed youngster George Dillon (TIME, May 9), poetry-addicts will reach off their shelves two volumes not yet dog's-eared from fervent use. These volumes will be Boy in the Wind (1929) and The Flowering Stone (1931), which later won its author, besides the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim award.

Scion of "an interminable line" of not interminable Georgia preachers and physicians, Poet Dillon, since he entered the University of Chicago in 1923, has been a chronic prizewinner. At the University he won the John Billings Fisk Prize for the best poetry written by a student. Poetry, The Magazine of Verse, gave him its Young Poet's Prize, invited him to become associate editor. Boy in the Wind was the first selection of the Poetry Book Club, won the Chicago Foundation for Literature Prize. Among more personal prizes he counts the friendship of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

His first volume's title poem outlines Poet Dillon's general technique, general theme:

He wanders east. He wanders west.

Where will he ever come to rest,

With that fire blowing in his brain,

And that bird grieving in his breast?

Characteristic of his inspiration is it that his fire blows rather than burns. Later poems reveal a more philosophical resignation :

Alive in space against his will,

A man may find along his way

Some loveliness to live for still.

To live for some such loveliness Poet Dillon a year ago gave up his job as a Chicago advertising man, turned to poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship. On April 30 he was already Europe-bound, off just too soon to receive news of his prize firsthand.

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