POETRY AND SOCIOLOGY.

The purpose of this article is to show that changes in sociology in the last two decades raise rather insistently the question of what poetry can mean for the sociologist at a deeper level. It will be suggested that even the more full bodied language sociologists now use, while being more poetic in a general sense, paradoxically all more leaves the poem itself as something clearly different. This difference is found in the resonance poetry characteristically, has a resonance itself characterized by meaningfulness and capable of giving the poem endurance. The language of ordinary society, on the other hand, continually gets locked into the extra linguistic matters of institution, interaction and convention. There are implications in this for both sociological language and sociology generally. Clearly, there has been a considerable change in sociology in the last twenty years and everybody is conscious of a deep realignment in the discipline in the last two decades.