The Bookseller reported that poetry sales in the UK have reached a historic high, with a significant boost from Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey, which has made Homer popular again. Editions of The Odyssey and its prequel, The Iliad, have generated nearly £1m in book sales in the UK this year. Even excluding the Homer effect, sales of poetry texts and anthologies were still up by 7.2% from an already high base.
Instapoets lead the surge
The driving force behind the sales surge is not traditional poets like Berryman, the Brownings, Marvell, Milton, Pope, or Pound, but so-called "Instagram poets" such as Donna Ashworth, Rupi Kaur, Amanda Lovelace, and Lucas Jones. Jones's collection, I Still Believe in Miracles, has earned £400,000 in sales this year.
These poets appeal through directness, aiming to be the reader's new best friend. Jones writes in the introduction, "Maybe you kinda feel how I feel." Lovelace dedicates her 2022 collection, unlock your storybook heart, to "anyone who feels like they’ve yet to find themselves: i promise it’s not too late," and advises readers to practise "self-care before, during and after reading."
Critics divided
Critics dismiss such work as more therapy than poetry, arguing it belongs in the self-help section. Since Instapoetry emerged online in the mid-2010s, a fault line has developed among poets and critics. Rebecca Watts's 2018 article in PN Review dismissed poets like Kaur, Kae Tempest, and Hollie McNish as "artless and amateur," highlighting the divisions. The Instapoets have migrated to print, but the debate continues: is this literature for a post-literate age, or a healthy riposte to a canon that is mostly "male, pale and stale"?
Dangers of co-option
While a corrective to the canon is overdue, and poets appealing to a young readership with mental health issues should not be dismissed, there are dangers. In June, Faber published Talking in Bed, a slim anthology of Philip Larkin poems, which some see as co-opting Larkin into the poetry-as-therapy movement. The blurb says, "He finds a way of admitting and delineating our nagging questions and most complicated feelings," but the acerbic Larkin would likely not have appreciated this. Poetry should be allowed to be hermetic as well as accessible, and threatening as well as therapeutic.
