A Long Conclusion: On the Uses of Poetry

This chapter summarises the key conclusions of the study, and it seeks to draw out three specific ‘use-values’ of poetry, three particular affordances of poetry as these were glimpsed in the course of the research. Firstly, the chapter reflects on poetry’s capacity to rehabilitate language, recovering it from the instrumentalised condition to which it is consigned in so much political and commercial discourse. Secondly, the chapter considers the idea of inspiration. It argues for a sociological understanding of the term which recognises that poetic creativity really does entail a kind of ‘un-selfing’, not with respect to some otherworldly creative power, but in relation to the historically and socially constituted traditions which sustain and accord value to particular aesthetic practices. Finally, finitude. The chapter argues that in a world characterised by a pervasive sense of ‘endlessness’ one of the most precious uses of poetry might be the extent to which our encounter with poems can grant us, even if only for a moment, a sense of something completed.