Taylor Swift’s complicated embrace of tortured poets

WWho was the first tortured poet? Perhaps the ancient Egyptian who wrote, sometime in the 15th century BCE: “My beloved stirs my heart with his voice. He causes sickness to take me… My heart is wounded.” Perhaps the poet Catullus, whose sorrows illuminated ancient Rome: “I hate it and I love it,” he explained in Latin, “and it is unbearable,” or (depending on the translator) “it crucifies me.” Petrarch’s sonnets in fourteenth-century Italy complained that love was both scorched and icy. Mary Wroth, Shakespeare’s contemporary, agreed: love made her “burn and yet freeze: better to be in hell.”

All those poets felt tortured by erotic love – and their struggles sometimes hurt other people too, if they got too close. The trope of the tortured poet whose gifts would destroy him (or, less often, her) emerged later, when European writers began to see poets as especially sensitive, anguished, or fragile. “We poets in our youth begin with joy,” reflected William Wordsworth in 1802, “but then in the end come despondency and madness.” This second line lengthens as if revealing the harsh truth. A genuine poet in France may be a “poète maudit” (“cursed poet”), such as Charles Baudelaire or Arthur Rimbaud, marked by fate, mental illness or alcohol dependence. In the 20th century, the type (or stereotype, really) could fit all sorts of wild, self-destructive creators, especially men, from Dylan Thomas to Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Calling your new album The Department of Tortured Poets, Taylor Swift refers to this tradition. She also mocks, comments and rejects, as the prose that accompanies the album suggests. “There is nothing to avenge, there is no score to settle after the wounds heal,” said Swift he wrote in an Instagram post. “Our tears become sacred in the form of ink on a page. Once we tell our saddest story, we can let go of it.”

Seeing her work as ink on a page, not just a song in the air, Swift claims to be a literary writer—the most notorious poet of the modern era. Fans first speculated that she appropriated the “tortured” mantle from the group chat co-run by her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, which Alwyn called “The Tortured Man Club.” It could be, but it’s much more than that, and it could also point to other recent relationships. Taylor creates some distance between herself and the stereotype she invokes. “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith,” says Swift. the title track declares. “This isn’t the Chelsea Hotel. We’re modern idiots.” He’s not that talented, and she’s not that dramatic. Or rather, she is dramatic in a different, much more deliberate way: one that suits her own craft, always thoughtful but rarely raw.

See more information: Every Reference in Taylor Swift’s Title Track ‘The Tortured Poets Department’

Swift also reclaims for herself — and other female artists — the power that supposedly comes from chronic anguish, from feeling like a tortured mess. “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” Swift warns in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” If she feels tortured and reacts with poetry, this is not endemic to poets; it is the logical consequence of a romance gone wrong and a life lived in public. “I was meek, I was kind until life in the circus turned me bad,” she sings. “You caged me and then called me crazy / I am who I am because you trained me.”

But if Swift became president of the Department of Tortured Poets, she didn’t get there because she was born that way: the rest of the department did that to her. His barbed words, his sharp hooks, and his sarcastic retorts are more akin to Wroth’s ardor and freezing than to Baudelaire’s condemnation. They share and mock their own emotional extremes. “Whether I’m going to be your wife or destroy your bike, I don’t know yet”, she explains in “imgunnagetyouback”, in a pun-like tone. “But I will bring you back” – or make you come back to me, or take revenge on you. Her phrases present a feminist revenge, turning her pain into (what else?) song. I’m so productive it’s an art,” she sings on one of the more upbeat new tracks “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” “You know you’re good when you can do it with a broken heart.”

Like all of Swift’s albums, The Department of Tortured Poets it contains multitudes and multiple approaches to the same situation, as well as containing various pop styles, from the 1980s-style synths on the album single “Fortnight”, written with Post Malone, to the acoustic guitar and strings of “The Albatross”. created with reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (former friend of Wordsworth, a long-time self-sabotaging poet). In “But Daddy I Love Him,” Swift fires back, with extra reverb, at fans who insist on telling her who to date and how. In “Down Bad,” she sums up her most difficult, immature moments in an elegant half-rhyme: “it all comes out of teenage petulance. I could just die, it wouldn’t make a difference.” But Swift for most of the album, with all her passion and all her pain, knows better than to blow her life up for love. Just like her character in “The Bolter,” she knows how to save herself, even when love feels like drowning.

The tortured modern poet – the poète maudit – the trope that Swift’s new album takes on and plays with and against, remains a powerful metaphor (she is no authority on literal torture, and never pretends to be one). Listeners who are analyzing Department of Tortured Poets Since the two halves fell two hours apart, we’ve already found our favorites, mirrors to our own falls through thin ice.

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It is surprising, even startling, to see the variety of their responses to love, poetry, and “torture.” Sometimes she amplifies, even celebrates, her own emotional turmoil and that of her characters. Other times (as on the title track), she pokes fun at the way they, as aspiring “tortured poets,” can’t get out of their own heads. And sometimes – to quote another poet, William Butler Yeats – she mocks the scoffers afterward, telling us to stop telling her what to do.

But she always shows us the art she shares with the great poets and composers of times past: the ability, as Yeats also said, to “articulate sweet sounds together” and to “work harder than all these” – harder than than anyone – in transforming all these feelings into art.