Digital Mourning and Online Grief in Post-2020 English Poetry

The COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in late 2019 and intensifying through 2020, fundamentally altered global experiences of death, loss, and mourning. Physical distancing, lockdowns, restricted funerals, and the sheer scale of mortality shifted bereavement into digital spaces. Social media platforms became primary sites for expressing grief, sharing memories, and building virtual communities of support. This article examines how post-2020 English-language poetry reflects and interrogates these shifts, focusing on “digital mourning” and “online grief.” Through close readings of selected works by poets such as Amanda Gorman, contributions from lockdown poetry projects, and emerging voices engaging with social media aesthetics, it argues that contemporary poetry serves as both a mirror to and a critique of digitized bereavement practices. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from thanatology, media studies, and literary theory, the analysis explores themes of virtual presence/absence, continuing bonds in algorithmic spaces, collective versus individual grief, and the aesthetics of fragmented digital expression. The study highlights poetry’s role in processing hybrid grief—simultaneously private and hyper-public—while questioning the long-term cultural implications for mourning in an increasingly online world. Findings suggest that post-2020 poetry not only documents these changes but actively reshapes emotional norms around death.