Poetry in the 21st century is both ubiquitous and oddly peripheral. Verses are displayed on subway walls, recited on momentous occasions, and served up in giant fonts on social media, but rarely do they merit a book review or a position on end-of-year reading lists. Yet the medium evolves even when it isn’t the center of attention, and over the past 25 years, its authors have pursued astonishing new forms and reinvented old ones. The Atlantic has prized and published poetry since its founding in 1857. And so, a quarter of the way into this new century of cataclysmic change, we thought it was an apt time to consider how poets fit into the broader conversation—to document an emerging canon of the most significant verse of the century so far.
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