Is Taylor Swift a ‘tortured poet’? Bruno Cooke listens to her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, to find out
For a while there, everyone was talking about Taylor Swift’s 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. Then everyone was talking about how much everyone else was talking about it. Then people started writing humour pieces about the whole shebang, and the Internet grew tired. Some of the dust has now settled. But if you thought that, as a subscriber to an online poetry magazine, you could remain blissfully ignorant of pop culture’s megastar du jour, I regret to inform you that we, like everyone else, are just like everyone else.
The album’s Google reviews graph resembles a scythe, pitched over, i.e. heavy on the fives and ones. Tay Tay is divay-vay, by which I mean divisive. Divisive things are challenging to write about. And writing something original about something everyone’s already written about is nigh on impossible. Who can blame us for joining in? Don’t answer that.
Why are we covering Taylor Swift’s latest release? Partly in response to an invitation: it’s the tortured poets department, which is at least to some degree our department. Is she really a tortured poet? Yes and no, according to my analysis. But for one thing, the inside sleeve of the physical album features a handwritten (printed) poem titled ‘In Summation’, signed “The Chairman” – as in, chairman of the department, a department of poets, our department.
And she is the boss, or so she proclaims, whether in earnest or with her tongue in her cheek. More on this later. It’s also worth noting that, for the work of a pop megastar, these songs are surprisingly un-catchy. I’ve listened to the album half a dozen times and would struggle to hum you any of its tracks without swerving blindly into some other pop tune. This is not a criticism. Swift sings in a conversational style, often sounding as if she’s riffing on a theme rather than hitting a particular tune. She leans occasionally on clunky rhymes, or half rhymes but often doesn’t rhyme at all – very ‘poetry’. This, combined with the title and presentation of the album, seemed like an open door. And so, with our tongues tucked earnestly into our cheeks, we thought we’d take her up.
Why are we covering Taylor Swift’s latest release? Partly in response to an invitation: it’s the tortured poets department, which is at least to some degree our department
Others in our field have already answered the call. In a piece arguing that Swift’s release draws on the legacy of Romantic Era literature, National Geographic draws readers’ attention to the writers it calls the “original members” of the department. In Britain, the big six Romantics were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Blake and Byron. Wordsworth said, “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. This might be seen as the spirit of Romanticism, which is worth bearing in mind as we venture forth and consider how big-‘r’-Romantic Taylor Swift really is.
Discussing the album, Rolling Stone insists listeners will “come for the torture, stay for the poetry”. But if you read the article before listening to the album, you’ll come away with the sense that, really, it’s the torture that’s worth staying for. “She sounds confused, bitter, raging, vulnerable.” The magazine paints a picture of dark sincerity. It identifies many powerful feelings. On its German site, it talks about the broken heart “mit Nägeln beharkt” (covered in nails) as artform, and sees “Traurigkeit und Verzweiflung” (sadness and despair) as occupying the tip of the pyramid of feelings driving the work.
Finally The Telegraph solicited the opinions of several “real-life tortured poets” on The Tortured Poets Department. Which says it all, really: Taylor Swift is not a “real-life” tortured poet, in that publication’s view. This, too, may not be a criticism, though it certainly reads like one on first glance. I have to thank a moderate Swiftie (with an -ie, rather than a -y; I checked) for pointing out the high horse from which one or two of those “real-life” poets pontificate. One writes about her as if she were a secondary school student reading their best efforts for the class. Another calls her backing tracks “Christmas carols”. Camille Ralphs, to her credit, says there are “bangers with the clangers”.
Ghanaian poet Dzifa Benson offers an alternative perspective. In West Africa, the trope of a tortured poet is an “indulgent western joke”. She also has this – the imagined, pidgin English reaction of Nigerian singer Burna Boy to Swift’s lyricism – which is worth repeating just for the hell of it: “Tay Tay dey yarn stories well but make we no gass am up like she be di Poet of Our Generation. Sometimes her lyrics dey clunk and slow down di groove.”
How much of a tortured poet is the artist behind The Tortured Poets Department? This question is not as easy to answer as I thought it might be
How much of a tortured poet is the artist behind The Tortured Poets Department? This question is not as easy to answer as I thought it might be. In the album sleeve poem I mentioned earlier, Swift, or her narrator, says she has been:
struck with a case
of a restricted humanity
Which explains my plea here today
of temporary insanity
In her “temporary insanity”, which is fleshed out by the bulk of the album, she mentions wanting to kill people, or die, several times. When love, or its absence, drives one insane, one naturally sees death as a solution. Examples include, from ‘Fortnight’:
Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her
From ‘loml’:
Our field of dreams engulfed in fire
Your arson’s match, your somber eyes
And I’ll still see it until I die
You’re the loss of my life
From ‘I Hate It Here’:
I dreamed about it in the dark,
the night I felt like I might die
And finally, from ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’:
‘Cause I’m a real tough kid
I can handle my shit
They said, “Babe, you gotta fake it ’til you make it” and I did
Lights, camera, bitch, smile
Even when you wanna die
There are pledges to burn possessions, too, as in ‘The Black Dog’, quoted below. Track 26, ‘The Prophecy’, leans heavily on religious and superstitious imagery. She’s “cursed like Eve”, “Gathered with a coven / ‘round a sorceress’ table”, “howl[ing] like a wolf at the moon”, plagued with dreams of “Poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand”, asking who she has to speak to in order to “redo the prophecy”. You might call it heavy-handed, but on a double album with 31 tracks, there’s plenty of room to explore a theme. Fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, betrayal and revenge – these are a few of her favourite things.
Fire and brimstone, heaven and hell, betrayal and revenge – these are a few of her favourite things
Retribution is a common thread, but the religious stuff isn’t all gothic horror. In ‘Clara Bow’, Swift juxtaposes heightened religious diction with colloquial language in a way that feels refreshing. She sings, “It’s hell on earth to be heavenly / Them’s the breaks, they don’t come gently”. There’s a comparable volte-face in ‘The Black Dog’, which adds a spark of comedic levity to what is otherwise a dark and moody poem-song. The Black Dog in question is a pub, by the way.
Six weeks of breathin’ clean air
I still miss the smoke
Were you makin’ fun of me
With some esoteric joke?
Now I wanna sell my house
And set fire to all my clothes
And hire a priest to come and exorcise my demons
Even if I die screaming
And I hope you hear it
[Chorus]
And I hope it’s shitty in The Black Dog
If exorcisms and suicidal ideation weren’t enough, you’ll also find occasional dives into the realm of the imaginary, and the extraterrestrial. In ‘Down Bad’, Swift compares love bombing – a form of psychological and emotional abuse and manipulation – to being abducted by aliens for the purpose of experimentation. ‘I Hate It Here’ is all about retreating to “secret gardens in my mind” and features fantasies of returning to the 1830s “but without all the racists”.
I hate it here so I will go to lunar
valleys in my mind
When they found a better planet,
only the gentle survived
In Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1957), psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung explains that the way we perceive and interpret inexplicable phenomena has changed over time. Long ago, the dominant way to decode the inexplicable was to attribute it to a pantheon of gods. Then, for some at least, it was one God. At various points along the way, pixies, faeries, spirits, foreign military crafts, the movements of astral bodies, and extraterrestrial beings have all been used to explain some part of the way things are here on Earth. So it’s no wonder that Swift deploys metaphors from multiple disparate worlds. She’s experiencing and processing trauma – which often rears its head in inexplicable or indescribable ways – and undergoing a transformative shift.
It’s worth returning to Romantic Era poetry here, for a moment. The literary concept of the sublime has roots in the 18th century. At its core is the idea that words can transport the reader outside of themselves, beyond ordinary experience, and that art is rooted in the capacity to imagine. John Keats was “certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination”. Melancholy and subjectivity are also fundamental to the spirit of Romanticism. Invoking aliens in an attempt to describe and explain an ex-partner’s behaviour is so Romantic, by these standards. Finding “lunar valleys” in your mind and saying you want to set fire to all your clothes? Imagination and subjectivity, in spades.
All this nudges Swift towards the lineage of the tortured Romantic. But it’s easy to get lost in the religious imagery, melodramatic talk of murder and death, and references to “temporary insanity”, and not see past them. I have the same moderate Swiftie I mentioned earlier to thank for discouraging me from approaching Taylor Swift’s music in general, and this album in particular, too seriously. Tortured poets don’t call themselves tortured poets, so attempts to condescend to her as either tortured or a poet may be misguided. Swift herself may be using the moniker ironically, at least to some degree.
Tortured poets don’t call themselves tortured poets, so attempts to condescend to her as either tortured or a poet may be misguided
The first mention of it is in the title track, where she describes a typewriter as “straight from the tortured poets department”. Someone left it at her apartment. It’s not her typewriter. She doesn’t attach the label to herself, preferring “modern idiot”. When she namedrops Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith, it’s to disavow any claim to their reputations. She continues,
You smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate
We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist
I scratch your head, you fall asleep
Like a tattooed golden retriever
As far as the cultural trope of a tortured poet goes, smoking is a key identifier. But chowing down on confectionery isn’t. In ‘Fortnight’, she says she “was a functioning alcoholic / Until nobody noticed my new aesthetic”. Taken at face value, Swift’s recognition of this on-off alcoholism, with its air of exhibitionism, is self-effacing. A tortured poet would go on drinking even after everybody stopped noticing, whereas drawing attention to the fact that she saw alcohol addiction as a fashion statement rather than, say, a disease, demonstrates self-criticism and something like humility.
In many ways, it’s counterproductive to isolate a specific work from the rest of Swift’s oeuvre, as it abounds with intertextuality. There are allusions dotted throughout this album to previous songs. To see what I mean, visit the Genius website’s page on any of the tracks and check out the contributors’ annotations. The connections fans find between tracks often span decades, and are mostly believable. This is how she works: in constant dialogue with her fans, building rapport, and rewarding dedicated listening.
I’ve also come to realise that you cannot review the album of a popstar like Taylor Swift without paying attention to – reviewing, even – the persona behind it. Sorry, Roland Barthes. A vulturous and unforgiving media class hangs on her every move. They analyse everything she says. This inevitably filters into her attitude towards music production, and one can imagine her planting lyrical red herrings, knowing people will chase them. Everything she does is suffused with awareness that it will be scrutinised. See ‘Cassandra’:
So, they killed Cassandra first ’cause she feared the worst
And tried to tell the town
So they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say
Do you believe me now?
We can talk about intertextuality, half rhymes, wordplay or clever juxtapositions, and under such a light The Tortured Poets Department does some good stuff. But it’s not a useful way of reading the album. Swift’s poetic strength is in the development of voice, building relatable, accessible narrative arcs over the course of multiple albums, and maintaining a persona that is somehow on a level with Swifties all over the world.
We can talk about intertextuality, half rhymes, wordplay or clever juxtapositions, and under such a light The Tortured Poets Department does some good stuff. But it’s not a useful way of reading the album
Imagine, if you will, Taylor Swift at a pub with her closest friends. They’ve got a booth, or a table. They’ve got pints of Stella Artois (just go with it). She’s a few months post-breakup, and with the clarity of hindsight she’s trying to understand how she let things get to where they were. The signs were all there. She’s ashamed for the way she acted, yes, but even more so for allowing the pain to go on, for not standing up for herself. This is how we should be reading The Tortured Poets Department. The character she’s embodying isn’t so much a tortured poet as a self-deprecating (small-‘r’) romantic, a thirty-something who, after work, regales their mates with their (ex-)partner’s latest bout of shittiness, and follows their diatribes with claims that they “could just kill” whomever it is, “wring his neck” or simply “die”. Her fans dig this.
Don Paterson writes, in the Telegraph piece mentioned earlier, that Swift’s “self-aware wit and […] positive message of self-actualisation” are “of a piece with how she helps the young women of her fan-base counter their own daily torture-by-smartphone”. I agree. Swift frequently points to recurring mistakes she herself admits making. In ‘I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can), she sings:
They shake their heads sayin’, “God, help her”
When I tell ’em he’s my man
But your good Lord doesn’t need to lift a finger
I can fix him, no, really, I can
And only I can
Her work doesn’t alienate. She universes her tribulations and her broader experience, and in some cases that includes taking an ironic glance at her own past, and presenting it in grisly detail in order to elicit a solidarising reaction from her fanbase. If this speaks to you, you may be a millennial.
So, tortured? Most definitely. A poet? Sure. Tortured poet? The jury’s out. But as one of the most prominent, loved and successful artists of her generation, Taylor Swift merits a critical reading. And, I hope you’ll agree, The Tortured Poets Department stands up to it. The mammoth double album tells a story, engages its audience meaningfully, and demonstrates serious and considered character development. Its use of language may not win a Pulitzer for Poetry. Nor is that the point. As poets, and readers of poetry, it’s easy to overlook the big hitters. But in doing so, we might miss something. There are bangers with the clangers, indeed.
