Prizes by themselves are quite meaningless. Some prizes do have an impact of opening some doors, creating some opportunities (e.g. a reading series in Hong Kong that only invites winners of the Pulitzer), but even these are fairly minimal benefits when you think about it. In the US, there were really only 4 prize series for poetry through the Second World War -- the Levinson (given by Poetry, essentially a "best poem" award for the magazine), the Pulitzer, the Yale Younger Poets and -- just for students at Michigan -- the Hopwood. So when the Bollingen was created in 1948 and given to Pound, it was a very visible protest against the folks who wanted to ban his work after WW2.

The only reason the Pulitzer has its outsized prestige is because that is the award series created for newspapers, which means that newspapers have reported it faithfully forever. The Levinson, which is even older, goes out each year and causes barely a ripple -- Rae Armantrout just won it.

Overall, however, they are an index of culture, more useful in looking at the sociology of literature than in any inherent value. For example, that John Crow Ransom won his second Pulitzer in 1979 shows just how long the shadow of New Criticism lingered over the academy, or that Stevens and Marianne Moore did not receive any until the 1950s -- the era of Frank O'Hara and the prosecution of Howl.

One of the values of the plethora of awards we have now is that it lays bare the meaningless of it all. But anything that gets money into the hands of poets is something I would gladly support, even if it's poets who make me gag or yawn.

Ron