What is Poetry Scholarship Today?

Abstract How has poetry scholarship changed in the new millennium? This essay considers some significant ways of studying poetry that have emerged, while charting a range of works that have inspired contemporary scholars. After examining the inflection point of 2015, the essay argues that by 2025, the field’s methods, objects, and canons have changed irrevocably. Poets of color and scholars of color have powerfully shifted critical conversations around poetry and the project of poetics as a field of study. At the same time, literary production itself has changed dramatically in this US, as MFA programs have multiplied exponentially. The essay concludes that some key critical and poetic works, in tandem with sociocultural shifts, have transformed the terms in which poetry and poetics are discussed.