Commentary The annual T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the most valuable in Britain, has just been awarded to a woman called Joelle Taylor. As I have not read her work, I am in no position to judge its quality, which may be very high indeed. In any case, I confess to some difficulty in judging the value of new poetry: I am not even sure that I should recognize a new John Keats were one to emerge. It is salutary to remember that some good judges of poetry failed to recognize his genius while he was still alive. The impression given by a brief review of the recent winners of the T.S. Eliot prize, however, suggests that the judges of the prize are at least as concerned with bringing about supposed social justice as with poetic merit. They seem to take a neo-Stalinist view of writing and writers, that they …