Poetry is Not Dead: An Essay in Defense of the Living Word

For centuries, people have been sounding the death knell for poetry. Each new era declares it obsolete—too archaic, too obscure, too out of touch with modern taste. Yet, despite the obituaries, poetry endures. It may vanish from bestseller lists and vanish from bookstore shelves, but it never vanishes from the human heart. If poetry were dead, we would not reach for it in our grief, whisper it in love, or turn to it when language itself feels inadequate.

Still, one must ask: if poetry is not dead, why does it feel dismissed—even by those who might be expected to champion it? Book lovers, librarians, and publishers often confess that poetry simply doesn’t sell. The statistics agree. Novels, thrillers, and self-help books move by the millions; poetry, by the thousands. The numbers look grim, but they tell only part of the story. They measure commerce, not connection. They chart what sells, not what saves.

Poetry’s “problem” is partly practical. The modern world runs on speed, and poetry asks for stillness. Readers seek either escape or instruction—plot-driven fiction to whisk them away, or prose that promises to fix or explain something. Poetry offers neither. It doesn’t hand out answers or resolutions. It sits quietly in the reader’s hands and says: come wrestle with me. It demands presence, patience, and a willingness to live with ambiguity. No wonder bookstores give it the smallest shelf—it refuses to hurry.

There’s also a perception problem. Too many remember poetry as an academic exercise—dense, coded, or bound in language that feels foreign. Shakespeare and Shelley, Frost and Eliot: revered, but often feared. Somewhere along the line, poetry became associated with homework instead of heartbeat. It was shelved beside difficulty rather than discovery. Librarians see this disconnect daily: while bestsellers fly off the shelves, the poetry section gathers dust. The industry, reading those patterns, invests less in promotion, which in turn reinforces the cycle of invisibility.

And yet, beyond the data and the dim aisles of forgotten shelves, poetry lives—and thrives. It has simply changed form. It’s on Instagram and TikTok; it’s in coffee shops, open mics, and podcasts; it’s woven into songs streamed by millions. Rupi Kaur, for example, brought poetry into digital consciousness with raw, brief, emotional pieces—poetry that lives in the pause between scrolling and feeling. Purists may argue that this is a dilution of craft, but perhaps it is more accurate to call it an evolution of delivery. Poetry has always adapted to its medium—from oral traditions to parchment, to print, to pixels. The form changes; the pulse does not.

I’ve wrestled personally with this evolution. I have read contemporary poetry that feels more like diary entries than craftsmanship—so sparse, it barely breathes. At first, I resisted this style, longing for challenge and structure. I still do. I love the rigor of form—the puzzle of a villanelle, the discipline of a sonnet, the compression of a haiku. I’ve written in contemporary free verse, too, including Love Me Like the Deep, which carries no rhyme yet carries rhythm. But form gives me joy. Constraint, paradoxically, becomes freedom. And so, while I can appreciate modern brevity, I find myself continually drawn back to the longer verse—to the beauty of order, the art of limitation.

The traditional gatekeepers—publishers, critics, and academics—may claim poetry is dying because it no longer dominates the commercial stage. They’re not entirely wrong: it doesn’t bring in the same profits or press. But that isn’t death—it’s decentralization. Poetry has gone guerrilla. It hides in unexpected places, speaks in new dialects, whispers through new media. It shows up not in ivory towers but in kitchens, on subway walls, and in the margins of someone’s heartbreak. It’s been democratized—less about prestige, more about presence.

Even in crisis, poetry proves its resilience. After 2020, in a world staggering under isolation and unrest, poetry reemerged as medicine. People wrote it in notebooks, posted it in captions, performed it in empty rooms through glowing screens. My own Post-2020 collection was born from that time—a document of fear, faith, loss, and endurance. Poetry survives because it is the language of survival.

Poetry does not need a marketing plan to stay alive; it needs human need. People still turn to it when prose fails—when a loved one dies, when faith trembles, when truth feels just out of reach. It is still the language we use for vows, memorials, and prayers. In those moments, the market is irrelevant. Poetry endures because it speaks in the soul’s own syntax.

So no, poetry is not dead. Far from it. It is living differently now—restless, scattered, sometimes raw, sometimes refined—but still breathing. It’s no longer confined to the academy or the anthology; it has spilled into the streets and screens. It’s whispered, spoken, shouted, and sung. It may no longer wear the robes of its ancestors, but it still bears the same heart.

For me, the call is not to mourn what poetry once was, but to honor what it still is—and to refine what it might become. Whether crafted in perfect meter or freed from rhyme, whether printed in leather-bound volumes or shared through pixels, poetry remains what it has always been: a conversation between humanity and the divine.

Poetry is not dead.
It never was. It never will be.