I laughed in your face and said,
Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department
“You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith”
This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel
We’re modern idiots
Poetry has always been a restless art—changing its shape, shedding its skin. It has always walked the line between the sacred and the personal, between structure and rebellion. In the early 20th century, modern poetry shattered the glass of classical form and let the light of a fractured world spill in. Enter T.S. Eliot, who spilled fragments of modern life across the page in “The Waste Land”— a dense, allusive and introspective masterpiece of the post-war world that weaves myth, memory and modernity in an unsettling pattern. This age also introduced us to the likes of Sylvia Plath, whose confessional verse bled truth and torment, and Anne Sexton who cut deep into the psychology of selfhood with her pen. W.H. Auden brought intellect and empathy into harmony, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl roared against conformity, electrifying a generation. These poets, and others reshaped the landscape with complexity, depth, and defiance, unafraid to fracture form or meaning in pursuit of raw expression. These poets challenged, unsettled, and elevated. They believed poetry should expand the reader, not simply affirm them.
But poetry, like language itself, is never static. In recent years, we’ve seen a dramatic shift—from page to screen and from carefully wrought stanzas to minimalist declarations served in bite-sized slides. Poetry often slips through the cracks of algorithms and scrolls, dressed in hashtags and neat line breaks—Insta-poetry, some call it. With millions of followers, some of these famous influencers have made poetry visible again in a culture of skimming and scrolling. And for that, there is reason to celebrate. Insta-poetry has democratised the poetic voice. No longer is verse bound by academic approval or publishing gatekeepers. Anyone with a phone and a thought can claim the title of poet. A kind of quiet revolution. Teenagers in small towns, people once excluded from literary spaces, are writing and reading verse again. Poetry has returned to the people.
Yet in this accessibility lies a tension. When poetry becomes too easy—too eager to please, too engineered for affirmation—we risk losing something essential. Much of Insta-poetry today is crafted not to challenge, but to comfort. It whispers what the reader already believes and dresses reassurance as revelation. Gone is the demand for complexity, for metaphor that unfolds rather than explains. The line between the poem and the motivational quote blurs. Some of these new-age poets (Rupi Kaur, I’m looking at you) string together vague sentiments or aphorisms, then break them into lines and call it poetry. The effect is often flat, the language lazy, the thought undeveloped. What should be an act of excavation becomes a performance of relevance. To many literary critics (and to me), Insta-poetry seems diluted—stripped of complexity, overly sentimental, and mass-produced. The concern is that by flattening the craft, we risk turning poetry into a slogan, a caption, or a fleeting feeling, rather than a lasting thought or an emotion that lingers.
The problem isn’t the length or the language being used in a poem, but rather what people categorise as “poetry”. A text message between two people is not poetry. It is a conversation. This does not mean that it lacks relevance, beauty, or emotion, but just because a piece is emotionally charged or reflects a personal experience, does not automatically turn it into poetry. There has been a rise of “poetry” books that are just filled with—well, the pages themselves barely are—endless text conversations and “deep” quotes. These might truly be insightful and moving pieces, but the bottom line is that they are unfortunately still not poetry. Writing “sad poetry” is now so absurdly romanticised as a sign of being “tortured and melancholic” that people use it as a measure of their mental illness. The idea of being this “tortured poet” (yes, this is a nod to the album and how it satirises this in the title track) is that it blurs the line between what is perhaps a therapeutic outlet and actual therapy.
These poems do not help us in diversifying our taste and growing as a reader. They treat poetry solely as a form of entertainment (which is perfectly fine) but poetry can be SO MUCH MORE.
Poetry, at its best, is meant to disturb as much as delight. It should stretch a reader’s interior landscape, invite discomfort, and provoke thought. But when poems are curated for mass appeal, when their aim is virality rather than vulnerability, we risk stalling the reader’s growth. If poetry becomes only a mirror and never a window, we are left staring at ourselves, unchanged.
Still, this does not mean we should reject Insta-poetry outright. Its existence proves that the hunger for poetry has not died—it has simply changed its appetite. Perhaps the challenge now is not to dismiss this new form, but to encourage its evolution, to urge emerging poets to dig deeper, to risk more, and to remember that poetry is not just self-expression—it is craft. It is art. It is labour.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go
T.S. Eliot
Poetry can be anything a person wants it to be—but it should never forget what it can be. It can console, yes—but also confront. It can democratise, but it must also dignify. And above all, it should never lose the courage to be difficult, the elegance to be lasting, and the ambition to reach beyond the comfort zone of a like.