Our attention spans are dwindling. Floating amidst a sea of content and stimuli our minds are increasingly distracted, drawn away from what’s in front of us, transported to the next thing. By design, platforms like TikTok and Instagram push content that can be consumed within a window of instantaneity.
Are you still reading this? If so, you’ve survived longer than estimates put the average length of time spent reading a single page, 15 seconds.
It seems people are reading less but consuming more. Yet, poetry is having something of a moment.
The Secret Life of Words
The latest figures suggest that poetry reading among 8- to 18-year-olds in the UK has reached its highest level since tracking began in 2010. In 2026, 30.7% said they read poetry in their free time at least once a month, up from 24.5% in 2025.
It is not difficult to see why poetry fits the way we consume content. Instagram poetry has turned the poem into something that can be encountered between a scroll and a swipe.
Rupi Kaur, one of the best-known names in the form, became a publishing phenomenon through work that is short, accessible and emotionally immediate. The rise of the ‘Instapoet’ has helped move poetry beyond the traditional confines of the poetry collection and into feeds, screens and everyday digital life.
The Odyssey
But this year something strange happened. Christopher Nolan made The Odyssey. Suddenly, one of the longest and oldest poems in the Western canon was back in fashion.
Following the film’s release, UK print sales of The Odyssey increased by 1,400% over four weeks compared with the same period the previous year. Across the first 30 weeks of 2026, The Odyssey and The Iliad together generated almost £1m in UK poetry sales.
Perhaps the lesson is not that people only want poetry when it is short. Perhaps it is that people want poetry when they have a reason to give it their hard to earn attention.
The best words in the best order
Poetry is concentrated language; Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it “the best words in the best order”. Poetry takes an image, an emotion, an argument or an experience and compresses it. Sometimes it’s only a handful of words. Sometimes it’s thousands.
Take William Carlos Williams’ This is Just to Say:
“I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox”
It continues for only a few more lines than this. There’s no elaborate plot, no grand declaration and barely any description. It is a note about eating someone else’s plums. And yet, the poem is not really about plums, is it?
There is guilt in it. Intimacy. Mischief. Betrayal. Mundanity. Williams give us the words and lets us fill in the rest.
It takes seconds to read – maybe even less than 15 – but it does not take seconds to think about.
Information is abundant, but attention is scarce
Today information is abundant, but attention is scarce. There is always another notification, another headline, video, or email. To communicate anything effectively, you must win the few seconds in which someone decides whether to continue. This is where poetry and PR begin to overlap.
This doesn’t mean your article needs to be a haiku and the best PR isn’t necessarily the shortest. An article might need 1,000 words. A report might need 50 pages. A complicated issue cannot always be reduced to a sentence. But the communication always needs concentration.
A press release has a headline. A news story has a first paragraph. A CEO has a quote. A campaign has a central idea. A social post has a few seconds to persuade someone not to keep scrolling.
The challenge is the same one poetry has always faced: how do you make every word earn its place? This does not mean dumbing communication down. In fact, poetry shows us almost the opposite.
The Power of Words
A short poem can be extraordinarily difficult. Its brevity does not make it simple. Sometimes removing words creates more work for the reader, not less. The poet trusts the audience to make connections, recognise an image and supply some of the meaning themselves.
There is a temptation in PR to explain everything. To add another sentence just in case. Another statistic. Another qualification. Another paragraph explaining the paragraph that came before it.
Sometimes that is necessary. Often it isn’t.
The Empty Space
The most memorable communication can be the communication that leaves just enough space for audience participation. Perhaps that is the real lesson from poetry’s popularity.
It is not that audiences have suddenly developed an appetite for only short, easily digestible poems. The success of The Odyssey makes that difficult to argue. Nor is it that poetry has become universally popular simply because it is available on Instagram.
Instead, poetry seems to be proving remarkably adaptable to the way people encounter ideas now. It can appear in a social media feed or across hundreds of pages. It can arrive in fourteen words or take thousands of lines to tell its story.
The form changes. The need does not. We still want language that makes us stop. For PR, that is worth remembering.
The answer to a shrinking attention span is not to say less. It is to say what matters, clearly and deliberately. To find the line worth reading. The statistic worth remembering. The quote worth repeating.
Poetry has been doing this for centuries. People have not stopped reading. Perhaps they have simply become more selective about what they are willing to read.
If that is true, every word matters.
Written by: Thomas Hale
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