Versifying your reading list: Using poetry to teach inequality

Employing literature as a pedagogical tool in the sociology classroom is a well-known and accepted practice in many courses and curricula. Yet nearly every discussion of this "sociology through literature" approach either explicitly refers to or implies the use of novels. In this paper, the sociology through literature approach is extended to include poetry as pedagogically useful classroom material. Poetry provides many of the gains attributed to using literature in general, while also conveying some unique advantages over other literary forms. I discuss the benefits of using poetry to teach and apply sociological concepts, and provide specific examples of how I employ this technique to teach social inequality.