The biggest sales of poetry since records began are expected this year. The reason? The movies, of course. UK print sales of The Odyssey increased by 1,400% in the four weeks to 25 July compared with the same period last year. In the US, year-to-date sales of The Odyssey are up 76% so far. Christopher Nolan is doing miracles for Homer – whatever problems one might have with the movie (and Emily Wilson, who made the most popular recent translation, has a few).

Strip out the Odyssey factor, though, and poetry is still doing exceptionally well, driven by writers whose work is often mildly denigrated as “Instapoetry”, such as Lucas Jones. His is a kind of versifying that delivers immediate uplifting aphorisms rather than either the kind of dense, allusive play with language that might reward repeated reading; or the sort of limpid, performable music that propels a well-translated Homeric epic. But even so, the poets of Instagram reach for something that can’t quite be expressed through everyday speech. And readers respond to it.

Sales figures are a rough and insubstantial metric, though. They don’t tell us how someone feels when they read a good poem, what it expands for them, what memories it brings, what connections to other times and places. What shiver of alienation it offers; what moment (often) of puzzlement. Poetry can be baffling; it can refuse to unfurl all of itself to the reader. Better, I think, to sink into the sensations that a poem creates than always to worry at it like a puzzle. By its nature, poetry expresses what can’t be said in prose; it can be resistant, you can snag on it. Poetry is needed in an emergency, when ordinary ways of writing or speaking can’t get at the moment, or........

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