Taylor Swift isn’t a tortured poet
When James Joyce was writing “Ulysses," his 1922 modernist masterpiece, he is supposed to have declared, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." When it comes to interpretive zeal, however, Joyce scholars have nothing on Swifties, the ferociously dedicated young fans of Taylor Swift. As soon as the pop star announced, in February, that her next album would be called “The Tortured Poets Department," the internet started to speculate about the title’s significance.
When the album was released on April 19, the “close reading" of Swift’s lyrics, as it would be called in English departments, went into overdrive. Most of this fan detective work is biographical, trying to figure out which person or incident Swift is talking about in each song.
But “The Tortured Poets Department" also raises a genuinely literary question. Why does Swift’s title make immediate sense to millions of listeners who don’t read much actual poetry, but have absorbed the idea that poets are and should be dark, brooding, emotionally tormented figures? Why is the idea of the tortured poet so central to our cultural imagination? The only poet referred to by name on Swift’s album is a classic example.
In the title song, she tells an unnamed lover: “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’rе modern idiots." Dylan Thomas, who died in 1953 while staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, wrote hypnotic poems whose power comes in large part from being difficult to understand. (For instance: “How now my flesh, my naked fellow,/Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,/Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.") But his legend rests largely on his
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