The Importance of Instapoetry in Light of Dominant Forms with Special Reference to Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey

Abstract

Recently Instapoetry, a form of minimalist poetry, has emerged as a result of using Instagram as a platform for expression. It has strived to gain validity since many of Instapoets have gained millions of followers who have approved this kind of writing which, most of the time, is accompanied by advertisements that symbolize the hidden economic agenda that controls who will get published. However, Instapoetry has been and is still being faced by a wave of disapproval. The paper’s argument is to verify the validity and investigate the reliability of Instapoetry, an emergent subgenre, by measuring it against the dominant literary canon which includes areas of the residual. The paper sheds light on how the Marxist economic approach to literature reproduction affects this newly-exercised type of poetry; to what extent Instapoetry can be considered a mirror of social values, and how it can be a form of propaganda. The researcher compares theories of poetry in Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry in order to formulate measurements, a paradigm, against which this, and other future types, of poetry can be tested, putting in mind the economic factor that has changed the map of publishing houses in the UK and the USA in 2017 for example.