Is poetry actually a dying art form, or is it just changing shape in front of us?

[Neuer31]

Poetry gets declared dead or dying on a fairly regular basis, usually pointed to as evidence that shrinking attention spans and the dominance of short form video and social media content have finally crowded out an art form that demands slower, more deliberate attention than most people are apparently now willing to give anything. Traditional poetry collections genuinely do sell in far smaller numbers than novels or nonfiction, and literary poetry magazines have shrunk considerably in both circulation and cultural relevance compared to their mid twentieth century heyday, giving the pessimistic case at least some real evidence to point toward.

At the same time, poetry has arguably found genuinely new and enormously popular audiences in places that would not have existed a generation ago. Instagram poets have built followings numbering in the millions with short, visually presented pieces, spoken word and slam poetry continue to draw large, passionate live audiences, particularly among younger writers, and song lyrics, which plenty of people already consider a close cousin of poetry, remain as central to popular culture as they have ever been. Whether any of that actually counts as evidence of poetry's continued health, or simply evidence that something calling itself poetry has survived while losing whatever depth and craft the term used to imply, is exactly where opinion tends to split sharply.

So is poetry as an art form genuinely dying out, or is it simply evolving into new formats and new spaces that a more traditionally minded reader might just not be paying close enough attention to notice?