"ONLINE POETRY AND CONFESSIONALISM: A 2020 TREND"

Abstract

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was forced indoors and online indefinitely. This wrought havoc on people’s mental health, inducing anxiety, loneliness, depression and more. In order to cope with this came a rise in online literature, wherein laymen turned into poets overnight. One thing that tied all these writers together was a sense of the collective ‘I’: in these raw writings, both the readers and writers found an outlet for their mental anguish. For this and the fact that they were published on easy-access platforms like Instagram, such writings gained instant and great popularity. Although online poetry has lately been debated regarding its literary merit, the paradigm shift it brought about in the past year cannot be overlooked. The present research paper will thus attempt to reveal how online poetry during the pandemic has revived the genre of confessionalism and has immensely aided in coping with mental health especially in these peculiar conditions of mandatory isolation and quarantine. This will be undertaken via a close look at the nature, appeal, and influence of Instagram Poetry in linking contemporary literary output and mental health.