Poetry remains both a reading practice and a form of creative writing. In 2022, 9.2% of U.S. adults—22.4 million people—read poetry during the previous year, while 4.8% listened through broadcasts, recordings, or web streaming. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) also reported that 7% of adults engaged in creative writing in 2017, including poetry. Together, these figures describe a broad ecosystem: people encounter poems at home, in school, online, in magazines, and in public places.
Contents
- Poetry readership over time
- Who reads and listens to poetry
- Creative writers and sharing habits
- Education and childhood exposure
- Incidental encounters with poems
- Magazines and public transportation
Poetry readership over time
The NEA’s 2023 poetry audience blog reports that 11.5% of U.S. adults—more than 29 million people—either read poetry or listened to it through media in 2022. Reading alone reached 9.2%, or 22.4 million adults. The listening measure was 4.8%, or 11.8 million adults, and includes broadcasts, recordings, and web streaming. These are separate audience measures, so they should not be added together as unique people.
The reading rate has varied across the NEA’s reported survey years. In 2002, 12.1% of U.S. adults read poetry. The rate was 8.3% in 2008, fell to 6.7% in 2012, and reached 11.7% in 2017. The 2022 figure was 9.2% in the 2023 NEA account. The NEA’s 2017 SPPA report presents the 2017 figure as 12%, a rounded version of the same period’s result.
| Survey year | U.S. adults who read poetry |
|---|---|
| 2002 | 12.1% |
| 2008 | 8.3% |
| 2012 | 6.7% |
| 2017 | 11.7% in the 2023 NEA account; 12% rounded in the 2017 report |
| 2022 | 9.2% |
The pattern is not a straight trend. It shows lower reported readership in 2008 and 2012, a higher level in 2017, and a lower level again in 2022. Because the supplied NEA sources report different formats and rounded values, comparisons should retain the source’s year and wording.
Who reads and listens to poetry
Age differences are visible in the NEA’s 2022 figures. Adults aged 18 to 24 read poetry at a 9.0% rate, compared with 17.5% in 2017. Adults aged 25 to 34 had an 11.9% reading rate in 2022, close to their 12.3% rate in 2017. Adults aged 75 and older read poetry at 7.1% in 2022, down from 11.0% in 2017.
The same 2022 source shows particularly strong media-listening rates among younger adults. Adults aged 18 to 24 listened to poetry through media at 6.2%, above the 4.8% adult average. Adults aged 25 to 34 reached 7.1%, the highest rate among the age groups cited in the NEA blog.
The 2022 figures also distinguish audience groups by race and ethnicity. African American adults read poetry at 8.3%, compared with 15.3% in 2017, and listened through media at 7.6%. Hispanic adults read poetry at 6.5%, compared with 9.7% in 2017. In the NEA’s 2017 SPPA report, Black adults read poetry at 15%, White adults at 11%, and Hispanic adults at 10%. The 2017 report also states that women read poetry at a rate 6 percentage points higher than men.
Education and location appear in the 2022 media-listening figures. Adults with only some high school education listened at 6.3%. The rate was 2.0% among adults who finished grammar school and 3.3% among high school graduates. Urban dwellers listened at 5.1%, compared with 2.8% of rural dwellers.
Creative writers and sharing habits
The NEA’s 2017 SPPA report found that 7% of U.S. adults engaged in creative writing, a category that includes poetry. This is a measure of participation in writing, not a count of professional poets or published authors.
Creative writers described different intended audiences. Forty percent wrote only for themselves. Another 31% wrote only for people they knew personally, while 29% wrote for the general public. These categories describe reported writing audiences and are not necessarily mutually exclusive in every individual’s practice.
The internet was an important sharing channel: 41% of creative writers used it to share their writing. Other forms of literary participation were less common in the same 2017 report. Six percent of adults attended a live event featuring a poet or writer, and 2% took a formal creative writing course. For comparison, 4% read plays and 42% read a novel or short story.
The report also gives a broader view of reading differences. Women read novels or short stories at a rate 17 percentage points higher than men and read plays at a rate 2 percentage points higher. By race and ethnicity, novel or short-story readership was 48% among White adults, 45% among Asian adults, 47% among Black adults, and 32% among Hispanic adults. Adults aged 18 to 24 read novels or short stories at 47%. Adults with a graduate degree read any books at a 79% rate.
Education and childhood exposure
The Poetry in America summary report describes survey work conducted in 2005. In that study, 77% of all respondents said someone had read nursery rhymes or Dr. Seuss books to them when they were young. The figure was 80% among poetry audience members and 68% among the potential audience.
Childhood exposure to other poetry was less widespread: 45% of all respondents said someone had read other types of poetry to them as children. The share was 52% among the current poetry audience and 25% among the potential audience.
School was another common point of contact. Eighty-two percent of the poetry audience studied poetry in school, compared with 73% of the potential audience. Across the full study, 55% studied poetry in elementary or grammar school, 61% in middle or junior high school, 87% in high school, and 49% in college.
The same report records parents’ reading practices. Ninety-three percent of parents said they had read nursery rhymes or Dr. Seuss books to their children. The share was 95% among poetry-audience parents and 88% among potential-audience parents. Sixty percent of parents read other types of poetry to their children; the rate was 71% among poetry-audience parents and 29% among potential-audience parents.
Respondents’ evaluations of school poetry were mostly favorable. Sixty-eight percent of people who studied poetry in school rated the experience as mostly favorable, while 5% rated it as mostly negative. These figures describe retrospective opinions in the 2005 survey work, rather than a current assessment of classroom instruction.
Incidental encounters with poems
Poetry did not appear only in dedicated books or classes. In the Poetry in America study, 99% of adult readers reported incidental exposure to poetry in at least one unexpected place. Among respondents who had such exposure, 81% said they read or listened to the poem when they came across it.
The response was higher among the current poetry audience: 86% read a poem when they happened across one, compared with 67% of the potential audience. Seventy-five percent of respondents who read or listened to an incidental poem said they liked it, and 79% found it easy to understand.
Unexpected exposure sometimes led to further reading. Thirty-three percent of respondents said incidental exposure prompted them to seek out additional poetry. The figure was 38% among the poetry audience and 12% among the potential audience. For writers, these findings point to the value of making individual poems understandable and discoverable in ordinary contexts, while keeping the audience distinctions visible.
Magazines and public transportation
Magazines were a notable discovery channel in the same study. Seventy percent of magazine readers had seen poetry in the magazines they read. The share was 76% among poetry audience members, 59% among former poetry readers, and 38% among non-poetry readers.
Public transportation also brought poetry into everyday routines. Seventy-nine percent of commuters who rode trains, buses, or subways reported seeing or hearing poetry on public transportation. This is a measure from the Poetry in America survey work and does not identify a particular city, transit system, or later measurement period.
Taken together, the figures show several distinct routes into poetry: reading, listening, school study, family reading, internet sharing, magazines, live events, and public spaces. The reported measures come from different years and studies, so each percentage is most useful when read with its stated geography, population, and measurement period.