Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass has won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens prize for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry" from the Academy of American Poets. Hass is much-lauded: he was a MacArthur Fellow, won a National Book Award in 2007, and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, among other prizes.There are probably more people who write poetry than people who read it. If you think that poetry is valuable, this implies that you should find some mechanism to force people to read poems. Actually, such a mechanism was invented ages ago. It is called "school".
Subsidizing production does not make a lot of sense, instead, since there are so many poets around already. Poets find a lot of pleasure in their craft, whether or not someone reads their verses. So poetry prizes are a waste of money, from a social welfare point of view.
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