The price of rhymes: The evolution of poets’ status throughout history

•Develops a definition of artists’ social status based on a longitudinal study of French poets.•Poets’ status is based on prestige, and particularly shaped by instances of consecration.•Poets’ status entails social relationships between and within status groups. This article analyses how the status of French poets evolved over a very long period. I draw on Weber to define status as level of social prestige anchored in a community, involving forms of sociability and deferential relations between unequal actors. I show that artists’ status is notably shaped by instances of consecration. I use quantitative and qualitative data to assess poets’ status across the centuries. After being essentially a court occupation, the fall of the Ancien Régime put an end to the longstanding relationship between poetry and the aristocracy, where poets were subordinate in status and depended on nobles for their social existence and prestige. The social history of the arts is most often that of a shift from the patronage system to a market-based organization in which experts (peers and cultural entrepreneurs) along with the public became the main instances of consecration. But unlike novels or fine arts, poetry was unable to establish itself solidly in the market, and the public played little role in shaping poets’ status as opposed to peers. Poets had to find alternative forms of social life, at the expense of growing specialization and a loss of contact with the circles of power; this notably involved new forms of State support, the State remaining a crucial instance of consecration essentially through the education system. This made poets specialists of culture and literature, often holding as a second job positions in the cultural field and the education system. Yet none of this damaged the dynamism of poetry or its social recognition.