ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued (1993), poetry stands out from the rest of cultural production because it is not read and does not sell. It is precisely this conspicuous distance between it and the other arts, its refusal of usefulness and the role of a commodity, which confer on poetry its quasi-transcendental status (what Bourdieu terms its ‘charismatic legitimation’, p. 51). According to this logic of inversion, within England’s empiricist inheritance poetry wins a special place in the cultural formation by defying utilitarianism and asserting value. If we run the analysis across the binary oppositions of empiricism it emerges that, though poetry indeed privileges the denigrated terms ‘subjective’ and ‘fiction’, risking condemnation as ‘obscure’ and ‘silly’, it can even so assert a truth beyond fact, an effect strengthened if poetry aligns itself with ‘practice’, the ‘sincere’ and ‘amateur’ over against ‘theory’, the ‘artificial’ and ‘professional’. Chapter 4 argued that, from at least the time of Wordsworth, English poetry was able to install a version of empiricism within its own particular poetic practice. Although this is not the whole canonical tradition, a mainstream inheritance works by staging the presence of a speaker, who experiences reality more or less directly, and, empowered by this certainty, reflects on the implications of this active encounter.
