RUPI KAUR made her name on Instagram by attacking Instagram, a fitting ascent for the provocative 24-year-old poet who releases her short verses onto the slippery, reactive sphere of social media. In 2015, she uploaded a picture of herself lying in bed on sheets stained with menstrual blood. The post was removed, and she promptly hit back. “I will not apologise for feeding the ego and pride of misogynist society that will have my body in underwear but will not be okay with a small leak,” she wrote on Facebook and Tumblr. Vitriol and death threats came in droves, but so did followers. Today’s count is 1.7m.

Ms Kaur’s success is singular, but it is also a reflection of the times. Poetry is in the midst of a renaissance, and is being driven by a clutch of young, digitally-savvy “Instapoets”, so-called for their ability to package their work into concise, shareable posts. Taylor Knott Gregson, a best-selling poet, boasts nearly 600,000 followers on Instagram, where he posts verse scrawled on scraps of paper or printed using a typewriter. R.M. Drake—who counts Ludacris, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashian clan as fans—has a following equal to that of Ms Kaur.

Producing poetry for social media demands an emphasis on aesthetics as much as words. A former graphics student who started drawing as a child, Ms Kaur’s poems are often accompanied by sparse pencil sketches, variously depicting twisting bodies, crawling flowers, and fingers forming the shapes of hearts. “It’s a very Apple way of doing things,” she explains. “How can I make the branding so strong that people will be able to recognise that this is a Rupi poem without having the name there?”

This could sound like a grimly sanitised take on poetry; one that champions shareability over soul. But Ms Kaur’s work has substance, at least for the thousands of (chiefly) young, female readers who follow her. They are roused by her ability to confront varying facets of femininity, such as vulnerability (“I don’t grieve/ I shatter”), relationships (“there is a difference between/ someone telling you/ they love you and/ them actually/ loving you”) and gender hierarchy (“when my mother opens her mouth…my father shoves the word hush between her lips”).

Social media has been a powerful tool for Ms Kaur, but it does not define her poetry. The audiences and fans that it has helped her to reach are active beyond the internet, and their devotion translates into physical sales. Last year, poetry-book sales in Britain surpassed £10m ($13.3m) for the first time since records began, and Ms Kaur has helped to drive this uptick.

In 2014, she decided to self-publish “Milk & Honey”, her first book, despite being warned that doing so would alienate her from traditional literary circles. But Ms Kaur didn’t see how her writing could fit into these circles, anyway. “I would go to the poetry section of the bookstore and there just didn’t seem to be a book like ‘Milk & Honey’ in between all the Shakespeare,” she says. “I knew that I wanted 100% creative control over it. I knew how the cover should look. I knew the title. I knew the spacing.” Ms Kaur’s risk paid off. Just months later, the book was picked up and re-released by a publishing house. It spent months on the New York Times bestseller list and sold over 2m copies—more than all of the other top ten poetry books combined.

Such starry levels of success are astonishing for any first-time writer; they are almost unheard of for a poet. Just a few years ago, the industry seemed to be on a precipitous downward spiral. The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that while 12.1% of the adult American population claimed to have read poetry in 2002, in 2012 that figure had fallen to 6.7%—“the steepest decline in participation in any literary genre”. The value of the British poetry market in 2012 was only £6.7m; some independent publishers announced that single-author collections were no longer commercially viable.

Ms Kaur faces no such issues: she released her second collection, “The Sun and her Flowers”, last month. She is tentative when mulling the reasons for her popularity (“I can only guess”), and this is the basis of her appeal. When she talks, she does not try to over-intellectualise, but speaks candidly, and sometimes falteringly. Initially, she says, she was mortified at the prospect of using social media to promote her work. When her friend set up a Facebook page for her, she thought it was “the creepiest, weirdest thing ever...I was like, ‘who the hell do I think I am? Why do I have a page? I am nobody, right?’” But as it started to gather momentum, she understood how empowering social media could be. “I had never envisioned myself with such confidence.”

Ms Kaur is aware, too, that it is her anxieties rather than a sense of authority that appeals to readers; she is careful to punctuate her poetry with this authenticity, using direct, uncluttered phrases. “I’m writing for the generation that’s reading my work,” she says. “So I’m not talking down to them. I’m having the same experiences as them—talking about heartbreak or love or loss. Even if I am writing for me, that means I am writing something that is believable to that generation.”

A sophisticated psychological portraitist, Ms Kaur deftly taps into the nuances of her millennial readership because she, like her followers, knows how it feels to be a young woman today, torn between pressures to dismiss vanity, but to look good; to call out patriarchy, but constantly live with it, too. “i will always be scared I am not beautiful enough for you,” she writes. “i will change what I am wearing five times before i see you wondering which pair of jeans will make my body more tempting to undress.”

Although it is decidedly a product of the zeitgeist, Ms Kaur’s poetry is powered by something more enduring. “The one thing readers tell me a lot is ‘you were able to capture this feeling I had for so long that I just couldn’t find the words for,’” she says. “I have this fascination, this drive to find the words for those things that I am feeling.” Though some have criticised her work as formulaic or flimsy, Ms Kaur is undeniably equipped with the poet’s ability to articulate emotions that readers struggle to make sense of. That, more than striking line drawings or social-friendly graphics, explains her soaring popularity.