New age poetry and its rise with social media

The rise of social media has led to many things. The ability to share photos with families and friends is now just a click away. Businesses soon joined the social media train, and it is no wonder when artists began to use it to share their work as well. Art has and always will be subjective to those viewing and deciphering it, but in the past few years as social media has increased, more people have found ways to share their work, and with this surge of poetry, the art of poetry is dying.

Poetry has been a form of art and writing for hundreds and hundreds of years, from sonnets to ballads to limericks to haikus. Poetry can be hit or miss for some. Some people will come to love the rhyming flow that comes with sentences and word choices that may mean everything or nothing at the same time. All these things make some people love or hate poetry, but one common theme can be found among all poems. Poetry, albeit confusing, is an art form. It’s a thing that can have only one or a hundred different meanings depending on whoever is reading. However, in today’s new age of poetry, there is none of that.

This new-age poetry can be found anywhere on social media, such as Instagram and Pinterest. However, it does not hold any of the same standards and qualities that poetry before it has always held. All these poems you seem to find, they all have the same glorified couple stanzas. They go over the same metaphor, like “how the butterfly grows and so will you’ and ‘how you will change the world.’ The writing style, the metaphors used, and the word choice is all the same.

When scrolling through social media, it seems that these poems are just the same poem written by a different poet. Instead of stanzas being used as a writer’s choice to make a statement to change how the reader may decipher the poem. Stanzas are now being used as a crutch to make a dramatic choice when it does not hold the same power and meaning that it used to.

One of the biggest complaints in classic poetry is confusion and not understanding what the poet meant. This is the vagueness that plagues all poetry. That vagueness is one of the main things that makes poetry so beautiful and so meaningful. In this new age of poetry there is no guessing on what the poet may mean or what the underlying message may be. There is no interesting word choice, the metaphors seem to be the same thing in every poem even if they’re written by different poets. These new-age poems leave no room for the reader to decipher and explain the poem in their own way. The poet seems to be handing the poem to the reader and saying, ‘read this, this is what I meant.’ The poems leave no room for deciphering and analyzing on the reader’s part, which is one of the biggest things that makes traditional poetry so beautiful on its own.

In the end, social media has given many things to society, good and bad. It’s a place to share promote and create. However, not everyone is fit to be a poet. Poetry is an art form that takes more than just one metaphor and a basic online thesaurus. It takes time, compassion, and a true love for writing. Anyone can write poetry, but those who want to impact the world with their writing will do so, and those who don’t will continue to write the same as everyone else.