Symbolic Capital in “Church Going” and “In Santa Maria del Popolo”
Symbolic Capital in “Church Going” and “In Santa Maria del Popolo”

Summary/Abstract: Writing in the context of an increasingly godless age, Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn poignantly reflect on the experience of going to church in modern times. Focusing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus, and distinction, this article offers a sociological reading of “In Santa Maria del Popolo” by Thom Gunn and “Church Going” by Philip Larkin. Larkin concludes that despite its terminal decline, the church still socio-culturally matters and will continue to matter, whereas the speaker in Gunn’s poem offers a cynical take on the very viability and relevance of faith in modern times. At issue in both poems is the symbolic and cultural cachet of the church in relation to art. The poems address the religious affordances and the socio-cultural relevance of art differently. While Gunn’s poem puts on display the decline of religious sensibility in modern times through the decline of the symbolic capital of religious art, Larkin’s poem intimates that the church continues to matter, if only symbolically.

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