The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence in poetry as its condensed form, attention to feeling, and capacity to capture the zeitgeist attracts more readers than ever before. Australia has been at the forefront of experimenting with emergent and hybrid forms such as the verse novel, prose poetry, digital poetries, and poetic biography. Among the first to realise the potential of the Internet to create a vibrant cross-cultural dialogue around poetry and poetics, Australians initiated online journals that reached out globally like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review. Australia’s poets have increasingly garnered international recognition. Les Murray was dubbed “one of the superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky” by the Independent on Sunday (quoted in Davie) while Dan Chiasson discerned in The New Yorker that Murray was “routinely mentioned among the three of four leading-English language poets.” In 2017, Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann was the first Indigenous writer worldwide to be awarded Yale University’s prestigious Windham Campbell Prize.

Twenty-first-century poetry by women demonstrates a multiplicity of perspectives, connection and loss, and continuing revolutions across gender and genre. At the outset of the twenty-first century, “gurlesque” poets such as Arielle Greenberg stress artifice and performance in a heightened, ironic attention to the gendered body on display. While gurlesque focuses on the artifice of gender performance, hip-hop and performance poetries focus on authenticity and forms of truth-telling, engaging the politics of fourth-wave feminism. After 9/11, a sense of precarity would be heightened in the new millennium through manmade crises and natural disasters. A rise in decolonizing poetics has given particular attention to the subjection of the female body of color and modes of resilience. The new millennium is perhaps best characterized by writing that is linguistically innovative and embodied, known variously as post-Language poetics, a new lyricism, or hybrid poetry. Digital technologies brought paradigmatic shifts to the ways in how poetry circulated and who could write it.

The geopolitical landscape of the early twentieth century was one of dramatic change. A mass movement to cities brought with it new social phenomena such as the crowd, the streetscape, and the suburb. New technologies such as the airplane, the telephone, the camera, and cinema were making the orientation of the self to the world more dynamic, with new images and sounds encouraging innovative intertextual engagements with the “real.” Furthermore, as Rachel Potter suggests, “natural landscapes were disappearing and the geographical boundaries of nation states were redrawn.” Who and what was American, and the relationship of America to the world, was open to debate in light of complex, multidirectional flows of influence. As Ludwig Wittgenstein stated, “to imagine language means to imagine a form of life.” Deploying standard English in innovative ways or mobilizing other languages, dialects, or the vernacular helped generate new senses of belonging and hybridity. While writers like Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven challenged origination narratives with their impact in America, many Americans would become expatriates, flocking to European cultural centers, most notably Paris. Yet there was also travel of the mind, with writers like Amy Lowell projecting their own image on places they would never physically see.

The early twentieth century saw a Western craze in “all things oriental.” Eunice Tietjens was assigned by Harriet Monroe to go to China and report back for Poetry, with the resulting collection of poems Profiles from China published in Poetry (1916) and as a book (1917). Amy Lowell reviewed them as minor “exercises in the Chinese manner, [rather] than … an intimate fusing of the author's ego with that of China.” Lowell's own fascination with the Far East was fueled by her elder brother Percival's travels to Japan and Korea. Lowell noted, “Every mail brought a constant stream of pictures, prints and kakemonos flowed in upon me, and I suppose affected my imagination, for in childhood the imagination is plastic … [Those representations] all through my childhood made Japan so vivid to my imagination that I cannot realize that I have never been there.” Lowell wrote of Japan in Can Grande's Castle (1918) and China in Pictures of the Floating World (1919) and Fir-Flower Tablets (1921). On the latter, she collaborated with Florence Ayscough, who wrote transliterations, with annotations of the various meanings of each word and her own analysis.