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...