Promposal poet - Taylor Swift didn't wait for "The Tortured Poets Department" to prove she is (II)

Poetic pop

Her albums folklore and evermore, released by surprise in the middle of the Covid pandemic, delighted critics and non-followers of the singer, thanks to their folk instrumentalization and their very poetic lyrics. These also inspired the game “Shakespeare or Taylor Swift” on TikTok, where students have to guess whether a sentence comes from the pen of William Shakespeare or Taylor Swift.

But even in her more pop and “simple” songs, Taylor Swift works meticulously on her lyrics. “She's good at taking idiomatic expressions or common concepts and playing with them,” explains Elly McCausland, citing the song Out of the Woods from the 1989 album.

In English, the expression “we are out of the woods” means to be safe, that the hardest part is over. “She explores this metaphor from a literal point of view. She talks about the woods, in the first sense. She sings “the monsters turned out to be just trees” and in the clip she runs through a dark forest which attacks her and the branches wrap around her,” explains the teacher.

“She takes a phrase that we use a lot in English and she explores its roots, no pun intended, and what happens when we literalize an idiomatic expression,” continues the expert. To the untrained listener, and even more so to non-English speakers, Taylor Swift's music may appear on the surface to be "just catchy songs about love, relationships, life," but according to Elly McCausland, " they deserve a more in-depth reading.”

The Tortured Poets Department, the most poetic album?

With The Tortured Poets Department, no need to dig far: she embraces her image as a poet and no longer hides her literary references. One of the bonus songs is for example called The Albatross, a direct reference to the poem The Old Sailor's Lament by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or even to The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire.

Before discovering it this April 19, fans and academics imagined an even more poetic album, in the continuity of folkore and evermore. Elly McCausland also expects a "very meta" work with songs in which Taylor Swift writes about writing.

“I wonder if she hasn't seen all the interest she's aroused academically over the last two years and if she isn't making fun of us in a certain way, saying to herself 'I'm going to give these teachers what to talk about”,” asks the literature teacher, laughing. The singer, and promotion queen, seems to be well aware of her image as a modern-day poet.

She has been playing it voluntarily since the announcement of her new album, as evidenced by the library full of books and manuscripts that she had installed in the middle of Los Angeles. With The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift seeks to show her talents as a writer as much as to have them listened to. As she writes so well: “Anything goes in love and poetry.” And in communication too.