Abstract This study investigated the hybridization between an axion and plasmon polariton, attributed to the coupling achieved by combining modified electrodynamics and hydrodynamic approaches on a plasmon-polariton in a graphene periodic structure. The enhancement of the effective coupling was also studied. Furthermore, corrections for the axion and the lowest plasmon -polariton hybridization state spectra have been presented. An observable was proposed to detect axions, which is significant even when the effective coupling is not large, especially as the axion mass decreases. The study shows that the resulting structure provides a sensitive and wide-mass-spectrum platform for detecting axions at the sub-meV scale.