A Late Return to Form: Reflections on Sociology and Poetry

The terms of the relationship between poetry and sociology appear to be set at all or nothing. ‘Nothing’, in that there are remarkably few sustained sociological considerations of poetry as such, as a distinctive aesthetic practice in its own right. ‘All’, in that recent years have seen a number of calls urging sociologists to think about their own work and writing as sharing a kind of spiritual alignment with poetry and the poetic vocation. Against this backdrop, this chapter sets the scene for the study as a whole by reflecting on the sometimes fraught relationship between these two disciplines. In particular, I reflect on sociology’s reticence when it comes to addressing the question of poetic form, the distinctive ways in which poetry speaks to and of the world. That reticence is, in some ways, understandable given that such concerns have so often been used to sustain a restrictive or exclusive conception of poetry and its audiences. At the same time, I argue, it is a reluctance which is also rooted in sociology’s overly narrow conception of ‘content’ when it comes to cultural and aesthetic practices. Against that view, I try to trace out the lines for a historical materialist account of poetic practice, one which reads the formal qualities of poetry as themselves rooted in—or speaking out of—our always situated and embodied experience of the world.