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.

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

With a name like that - The Department of Tortured Poets in the language of Molière - the tone is set. Taylor Swift released her highly anticipated new album, The Tortured Poets Department, this Friday, April 19. The opportunity for the American singer to remind us that she is more than a pop star: she is a poet.

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)