Review: The Tortured Poets Department (just the title)

is taylor swift a poet?

Last night at the Grammy’s Taylor Swift announced her newest album, titled “The Tortured Poets Department”. To promote the album, she posted a tweet containing a pair of images. The first was the cover of the album, and the second was a bit of poetry. 

And so I enter into evidence

My tarnished coat of arms 

My muses, acquired like bruises

My talismans and charms

The tick, 

tick,

tick, 

of love bombs

My veins of pitch blank ink

All’s fair in love and poetry…
Sincerely,

The Chairman of The Tortured Poet’s Department

It has rhyming within lines, rhyming across lines, repetition, onomatopoeia, shape poetry spacing, creative use of modern language in “love bombs”. Indisputably poetry, great submission for TPDHS poetry club.  

To quickly answer my own subtitle question, the answer is yes. If Bob Dylan can win the Nobel for literature, Taylor Swift is a poet. 

Music has replaced poetry over the past century. Music is much easier to consume relative to poetry; it passively washes over you while you drive, or while you work, or while you enter numbers into a spreadsheet. Gone are the days of young romantic souls carrying Whitman in their pocket wandering grassy fields of America. They can put on some Porter Robinson instead. That’s okay, the world changes. Modern access to music has given average people so much deeper and richer feeling from art, which is ultimately what I value from art. 

The sad part of this replacement is that certain heights of poetry are not always reached by music. The words are not as good. The biggest reason, in my opinion, is that music doesn’t yet see itself as the replacement to poetry. Poetry and literature were always very adjacent cultural forms, but music was traditionally very separate from them. Music takes craft and sense of style in aspects that poetry does not, but in the overlap it has with poetry it’s not always as well-executed as great poetry is. 

Taylor Swift’s lyrics have gotten closer to poetry in the past few years. She’s always been a strong lyricist, but she’s developed more confidence in her writing starting with 2020’s folklore and evermore. Taylor Swift is not writing at the level of Emily Dickinson, but I think she’s reading Emily Dickinson and soaking in some of the style. 

How good is Taylor Swift’s poetry? It’s fine. Sometimes she’s overly flowery without achieving much (“how’s one to know, I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones, in a faith-forgotten land”), but that’s okay. Because she doesn’t fully identify with being a poet she’ll still randomly write very bad lyrics (“it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me. At tea time, everybody agrees”), but sometimes she makes songs that are very beautiful. I really love “mirrorball” and “You’re On Your Own Kid”, which I don’t think Taylor Swift ever could have written without her recent turn towards lyrical confidence. These songs are more raw than her more flowery and explicitly poetic songs, but I think she needed to write those to write the ones I like. 

The nice part of Taylor Swift’s lyrical poetry is that average nonpoetic listeners are willing to put in effort to interpret it. Taylor Swift’s celebrity makes people want to parse the meaning of the songs on to her personal life, which is part of it, but I think now that she is 34 years old that angle is fading. Average people just like her art because of the celebrity she’s accumulated. Because they care about her they care enough to interpret the poetry, or at the very least feel it. 

When Taylor Swift dropped the “Tortured Poets Department” album title the first thing I thought of was an interaction at party with Taylor Swift that Japanese Breakfast singer Michelle Zauner recounted in an interview: 

Taylor Swift at a party casually dismisses any attempt at literarizing her writing, reducing a real thoughtful question to “okay English Major”, neither affirming or denying her own artistic influences. This was a casual statement at a party, but people are often their real selves at parties. I think it’s a bit sad that she wasn’t willing to have a conversation about art with someone else who’s an artist. 

Maybe this is the moment where Taylor Swift even more deeply veers into the poetic, but I doubt it. I don’t know if she needs to either. It feels like a similar announcement strategy to 2022’s Midnights, which claimed to be about “sleepless nights throughout her life” but turned out to be just pop music. She claims that it’s about her “muses acquired like bruises” and I’m sure it will be. I think it’s just going to be more of lyrically confident Taylor Swift. 

Really, I’m not asking any more from Taylor Swift.  She’s done enough. What would be nice is more musicians writing with that same confidence and that same poetic eye. There are of course other musicians writing poetry at higher levels than Taylor Swift, but she’s the only one who has the clout to call it poetry, and I’m glad she did. But the Tortured Poets Department doesn’t have to just be one girl.