A poetics of ageing: intersection between literature, phenomenology, and care
Discussion about the 'meaning of care' in wider English society, influenced by art and literature, and history, is needed to understand people affected by dementia.
In Ozymandias (1818), Percy Bysse Shelley captures an inevitable decay of human power.
..Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The public perception of dementia can be seen as a result of the shadows that dementia casts on society.
Whilst there are rather technocratic and administrative drives to ‘change the narrative of dementia’, largely in my opinion lacking in emotion or real understanding of the nuances of dementia, people’s lived experiences matter an enormous amount in reality. In this blogpost, I should like to draw together several disparate strands to form a coherent and personal view of a future gerontological shape of care.
I first wrote about dolls and animals in dementia care in 2014 in my book “Living with dementia”. Very recently, however, I had a fundamental re-setting of my feelings about this subject of dementia after somewhat brief, accidental, conversations in a local coffee shop. These, though, had a massive, radical, intellectual effect on me, in my re-conceptualisation of the world.
The contemporary study of English literature, from the Enlightenment through the Romantic period, offers profound insight into various relationships. This body of work, while often concerned with sentiment, moral reflection, and aesthetic form, clearly anticipates key concerns that resonate strikingly with contemporary debates in the sociology of ageing and dementia care.
For example, in examining the agency of objects, literature provides established philosophical and ethical tools to understand how human flourishing is mediated through interaction with the world. By attending to the causal effects of objects, we can reconceive ageing not as a retreat from relationality, but, rather, as an ongoing, co-constituted engagement with the world. These ‘margins of philosophy, as Derrida would put it, are intended for us to challenge the ambiguity and tensions of the real world.
Romantic poetry, in particular, arguably, offers a radical “inversion” of the Enlightenment privileging of reason. In the work of Blake and Shelley, natural entities and embodied beings are not merely decorative or symbolic—they are active agents whose presence shapes human perception, affect, and imagination. Blake’s The Tyger, for instance, does not exist solely as a linguistic or symbolic object to be interpreted at a distance; it exerts a causal force.
The tyger’s “fearful symmetry” and its burning bright in the forest of the night engage the reader’s senses, affective responses, and moral imagination, producing wonder, apprehension, and ethical reflection. This causal dimension aligns closely with the notion that artworks and objects are not merely inert: they operate within networks of relations, independent of human cognition, affecting perception, feeling, and action.
A closer reading, of course, can illuminate how these effects are operationally realised. Alliteration, rhythm, and sonic resonance in Blake’s poetry shape bodily experience and emotional response, demonstrating that aesthetic form is inseparable from ethical and cognitive dimensions. The form is therefore not simply decorative. By attending rigorously to the text’s internal operations, the reader becomes attuned to the object’s agency, perceiving how meaning and impact emerge from the interaction of language, rhythm, and imagery rather than from an abstract didactic intent. Literary works thus can function as causal agents in human and non-human networks, intervening in the production of thought, feeling, and relational orientation.
The ethical and ontological significance of such agency resonates with contemporary narratives of ageing and dementia. In dementia care, objects—books, music, personal belongings, or environmental cues—all exert a causal influence on cognition, affect, and relationships. From a phenomenological perspective, the lived experience of a person with dementia is not confined to an internal cognition, but is co-constituted through interaction with the world. The existential philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on embodied perception emphasises that cognition, memory, and emotion emerge in situated world a hand brushing a beloved object, a gaze upon a familiar photograph, or the auditory resonance of a favourite poem triggers real, meaningful effects.
This insight challenges dominant cultural narratives that frame ageing as decline or abjection. I am now “fully saturated” with the verses of horrors from Kristeva or transgressions from Bataille. Rather than treating older adults, particularly those living with cognitive impairments including dementia, as passive recipients of care or knowledge, a relational ontology foregrounds their continued engagement with a meaningful, agentive world. The material and symbolic objects in their environment—books, music, photographs, animals, even therapeutic robots—participate actively in constituting experience and a person’s identity. Such an approach has a subtle more specific, and meaningful, “moral imperative” than previously framed in relation to an arbitrary ‘social imaginary’: to acknowledge the dignity, agency, and relational capacity of older adults, and to design interventions and environments that facilitate genuine engagement rather than reduce care to instrumental risk management.
The ethical stakes become even clearer when considering objects traditionally framed as “non-living” or instrumental. Robots, for example, are increasingly used in therapeutic contexts to provide companionship, cognitive stimulation, and sensory engagement.
While non-living in the sense of lacking sentience, they nevertheless exert real causal effects, shaping mood, eliciting interaction, and facilitating memory or social engagement. From a phenomenological standpoint, the effects of robotic companions can be experienced concretely: the texture of a robotic seal’s fur, the sound of a responsive voice, or the movement of a mechanical paw can produce genuine affective and cognitive responses. Ethical reflection must grapple with authenticity, relational integrity, and consent, ensuring that these objects augment rather than replace meaningful human interaction.
Animals, by contrast, introduce additional dimensions of agency and relationality. Therapy dogs, cats, and other companions are living, autonomous objects whose interactions with patients are unpredictable and complex. The potential avenues for engagement are indeed fascinating; look, for example, at Chris Packham in his discussion of dogs and his autism. Chris has spoken openly about a multitude of issues surrounding this. Engagement with an animal mediates cognition and affect, while simultaneously requiring attention to the animal’s welfare, creating a reciprocal ethical dynamic. Animals demonstrate that objects in dementia care are not merely instruments for a human’s benefit; they are co-actors in relational networks whose agency demands recognition. This recognition aligns with broader ethical commitments to justice and relational savouring (or interpersonal flourishing), emphasising care as an interactional, co-constitutive practice, rather than a unilateral “neoliberal” service.
The comparison between robots and animals highlights a key philosophical point: whether living or non-living, objects possess causal power and agency, shaping human experience in profound ways. The poetry of the Romantic era, with its attention to the autonomous vitality of natural and imaginative entities, anticipates this insight. Just as Blake’s Tyger asserts itself as an agent, so too do objects in dementia care, acting independently while producing relational and ethical effects. Practical criticism, by attending to the operative qualities of literary texts, offers an interesting methodological parallel: careful attention to internal dynamics and effects reveals the causal power of objects in both aesthetic and embodied experience. Robots can be deconstructed too in a different way.
Consider, for example, a person with advanced dementia interacting with both a therapeutic robot and a therapy dog. The robot may offer patterned and stereotypical responses, tactile stimulation, and predictable affective cues, producing calm, engagement, and social responsiveness. The dog, in contrast, introduces spontaneity, warmth, and reciprocal interaction, prompting the patient to move, vocalize, and engage in social and sensory exploration. In both cases, the patient’s cognition, affect, and relational capacity are modulated through interaction with objects that are independent, agentive, and causally effective. Literary analysis illuminates the layered dynamics of such interactions: the rhythmic, patterned qualities of poetry or narrative echo the structured response of the robot, while the emergent, relational qualities of animals parallel the complex interweaving of delicate motifs, imagery, and affect. Blake’s “Jerusalem” - in ‘ceasing from mental fight’ - is not just a nice anthem, it is a call to arms in theology and spiritual health.
The intersection of literature, phenomenology, and the sociology of ageing also foregrounds gender, sexuality, and the ethics of relations. Enlightenment and Romantic literature frequently explored the dynamics of love, desire, and relationality, often constraining women within prescriptive roles or idealised forms of affective expression. By attending to the causal and affective power of literary objects, we can recognize how these texts have mediated relational experiences, shaping norms of attachment, desire, and social expectation. In ageing, such insights translate into recognition of older adults as subjects of ongoing relationality, whose desires, affections, and engagements continue to manifest meaningfully, even in contexts of a biomedical cognitive decline. Ethical attention must therefore encompass the persistence of desire, affect, personhood and identity throughout the lifespan, resisting reductive narratives that equate ageing with loss of agency or relational capacity. This is relevant to the discussions of the Third/Fourth Ages.
Underlying this approach is an ethical orientation attentive to structural and social asymmetries or imbalances. Older adults, particularly women, are often marginalised within institutional care, with their preferences, subjectivity, and relational autonomy undervalued. An object-oriented ontology, or phenomenologically informed perspective, might emphasise that relationality is not merely human-to-human: objects, texts, environments, but that the world is not in fact anthropocentric, and indeed non-human agents mediate experience and flourishing. Care, therefore, becomes a fundamentally ethical practice that attends to these social frailties, recognising that dignity and agency are co-constituted in interaction with the material and symbolic world.
The whole philosophical framework connecting Romantic literature, object-oriented ontology, and dementia phenomenology suggests an urgent and radical reconception of meaning and agency. Objects—whether literary, natural, technological, or animal—exert real, independent influence; cognition, affect, and identity are distributed across networks of human and non-human actors; and relationality persists across the lifespan, even in contexts conventionally traditionally or historically framed as decline. Literary study, through practical criticism, offers a valid alternative, in both a method and a model: close attention to the internal workings of objects, their patterns, rhythms, and causal effects, illuminates broader principles of interaction, agency, and ethical responsibility.
And what would Plato think?
Plato might have valued pets and robots in dementia care only insofar as they cultivate the soul’s harmony and moral virtue, seeing them as tools for guiding character, rather than ends in themselves. Yet he may have worried that over-reliance on artificial companions could weaken genuine real human relationships and civic society.
Attending to literature from the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, with its rich engagements with love, gender, and sexuality, provides conceptual and ethical tools to reconceptualise ageing and dementia care. As Prof. Timothy Morton argues, art, like poetry, is causal: it acts upon perception, emotion, and imagination. Objects in the world—books, music, animals, and robots—exert real, agentive influence, mediating cognition and relationality. A phenomenologically and ethically informed approach emphasises relational flourishing, distributed cognition, and attentiveness to the dignity and agency of older adults, offering a framework for care that is simultaneously aesthetic, ethical, and socially engaged. By recognising the causal power of objects, the distributed nature or “mesh” of cognition, and the ongoing relationality of human life, we can envision and work actively for a sociology of ageing that affirms agency, creativity, and affective life in the later stages of existence, transforming both theoretical understanding and practical care.
Readings
Borelli JL, Smiley PA, Kerr ML, Hong K, Hecht HK, Blackard MB, Falasiri E, Cervantes BR, Bond DK. Relational savoring: An attachment-based approach to promoting interpersonal flourishing. Psychotherapy (Chic). 2020 Sep;57(3):340-351.
Morton, T., 2021. All Art Is Ecological. Penguin Books.
Moyle W, Jones CJ, Murfield JE, Thalib L, Beattie ERA, Shum DKH, O’Dwyer ST, Mervin MC, Draper BM. Use of a Robotic Seal as a Therapeutic Tool to Improve Dementia Symptoms: A Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial. J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2017 Sep 1;18(9):766-773.
Rahman, S., 2014. Living Well with Dementia: The Importance of the Person and the Environment for Wellbeing. London: Radcliffe Publishing.
Steck, C.W., 2013. Re-embedding moral agency: Linking theology and ethics in Blake. Journal of Religious Ethics, 41(2), pp.332–353.