Class and the Uses of Poetry

This book provides new empirical evidence about the ways in which social inequalities, especially those of class, shape and delimit forms of cultural reception and creative opportunity. How does it come about that, in George Orwell’s words, ‘the divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature’? Drawing on qualitative research conducted in and around Glasgow, Poetry, Class and Symbolic Violence explores how working-class readers engaged with, made sense of, and contested a sense of exclusion from, contemporary poetry. In doing so it sheds light on the symbolic enclosure of poetry, on how that enclosure takes shape in the encounter between readers and poems, but also on why poetry continues to matter. Through these conversations, and in further interviews with unpublished poets, it reflects on the creative and expressive affordances of poetry, on what can be done with poetry and what it can make possible. Sociologists have had little to say about poetry as a distinctive esthetic practice. Poetry, Class and Symbolic Violence tries to break that silence and to make a start on constructing a critical sociology of poetry for today.

Andrew Smith is Professor of Sociology at University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of two previous volumes published by Palgrave: C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture (2010) and Racism and Everyday Life (2016). He is the co-editor of Marxism, Colonialism and Cricket (2018) and has published various articles in journals such as Cultural Sociology, The Sociological Review, Cultural Studies and New Formations.