For her new album, Taylor Swift sets up a library in Los Angeles (and hides clues there)
Taylor Swift has always identified herself as a songwriter first, before being a singer. She now calls herself a poet by signing the promotional messages for her album “the president of the Department of Tortured Poets”. But she didn’t wait for her new album to write songs comparable to poems in verse or prose. From the start of her career in 2005, Taylor Swift was noted for her talents as a lyricist.
So much so that today, several universities, including the prestigious Harvard and Stanford, offer courses in analyzing the lyrics of his songs, in the same way as great texts of literature.
Taylor Swift, star of literary studies
Elly McCausland, professor of English literature at Ghent University in Belgium, and creator of the site Swifterature, is the first to give a course on Taylor Swift in Europe. For her, calling the star a poet is not surprising. “If we go back several centuries, poetry was an oral medium, spoken before being written, and often set to music. In a way, Taylor Swift returns to the roots of poetry,” she told HuffPost in the video at the top of the article.
Although all songwriters can, in some sense, be considered poets, Taylor Swift is a particularly relevant subject of study for literature teachers. Already, because she gives them a lot of material with her 243 songs (according to Rolling Stone counts), all of which she wrote or co-wrote.
But it is above all his refined writing style, without seeming to be so, which is well suited to analysis. Elly McCausland, for example, highlights her use of complex English vocabulary and literary techniques that are often associated with classical poetry. “She uses a lot of metaphors and comparisons, what we call figurative language,” notes the professor. But she does it in a way that we don't even think about it. It's subtle. His songs are made of layers, and when you peel them back, you find lots of interesting ideas. »
(to be continued)
