When is the last time any of us saw that question in the popular press or animating everyday conversation? Lately, those words are on everyone’s lips because of the release of Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department.  

Connecting with students’ real-life interests and concerns is something all teachers try to achieve, whatever their subject area. In my introduction to literary studies and research methods course, I updated my syllabus in 2022 to focus on the songwriting of Taylor Swift. I wanted to engage my students in what often seem like boring tasks: looking words up in the Oxford English Dictionary to think about them more deeply; finding scholarly and non-scholarly critical sources and evaluating their methodologies and credibility; coming up with an original claim that is both arguable and contestable. Swift’s songs offer compelling and challenging opportunities to practice these skills. 

Thinking about Swift’s songs can be both exciting and difficult in the classroom. Students often know her work intimately and have her writing memorized in an enviable way. No need to ask anyone to memorize a poem in this class. Yet at the same time, students often don’t know how to talk about Swift’s work objectively or as artistic or literary production. This affords a unique opportunity to show students how literary study matters and how much they, and others, care deeply about the arts and humanities. The stakes of these conversations can become personal. 

There are many ways to teach a course about or using Swift’s work, but mine is a formalist one. That means I am less interested (at least in the beginning of the term) in “thematic” readings of her songs and more concerned with how her songs operate as poetic productions set to music. Students’ extracurricular relationship to Swift’s music and especially her lyrics gives us a rare opportunity to think about the poetic marriage of sound and sense that is sometimes hard to convey with mere words on a page. While many of my students enjoy reading, few of them read poetry for fun. Until now.  

We begin by “anatomizing” the songs to understand their basic parts: verse, chorus, bridge, and, more sporadically, pre-chorus, intro, and outro. We take as our starting point a basic effort to note repetition and variation. The chorus repeats, often identically, a number of times in the song. The verses tend to outline, often using metaphor, the situation of the speaker.  

This spring, I used Swift’s song “Lover” to introduce song anatomy and to get students to begin the work of seeing repetition and variation inside the song’s various parts: not only inside the verse and chorus (rhyme scheme) but also across a single line, in which alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme play their parts. The New York Times produced an engaging series available on YouTube called “Diary of a Song” that offered a video-essay on “Lover.” The video melds conversations with Swift, her producer Jack Antonoff, and sound engineer Laura Fisk to explain how the song got written and recorded. It’s fun to teach with YouTube videos both to showcase the detailed work that goes into the complex process called “songwriting” and to use its details as a prompt for further analysis and critique. How it got made is not the song’s “meaning.” 

The video offers us a glimpse of how Swift often writes songs: struck in the middle of the night with an idea (“a little glittery cloud that floats in front of your face”) that you bring “back to what you know about the structure of a song.” Here, we see that song form has a big role to play in the way she thinks about her craft: the lyrics don’t simply spill out in any old way but “fit” into a larger structure that is based on the forms of songwriting in country, pop, and folk genres. But language and what it does is foregrounded from the first three minutes of this video in ways that we will want to pay attention to throughout the term and in our other classes on more standard literary texts.  

Asked about the title word, “Lover,” she says: “I’ve always liked that word, but I’ve never used it in my everyday life . . . But I’ve always loved it in the context of poetry and songs.” Already Swift has us thinking about language in a different way when she chooses it for effect rather than meaning. “Lover” has a power and a context that we need to give our attention to. It’s the very quality that we might, in fact, call “the literary”; it’s language that calls attention to itself as such.  And we hear it in what Swift calls the “walk down” in the song: “You’re my, my, my . . . lover.”  The repetition of “my” extends the simple utterance and delays the end, putting the weight of our wait on that last word: “lover.” Positioned as such by the walk down, “lover” calls attention to itself as a particular kind of language. It doesn’t disappear in the conveyance of sense or meaning. “Lover” end stops the line in a poetic mic drop. 

Using YouTube in this course showcases how what we do in the literature classroom connects with the real world of the text, both its producers and its consumers. That is part of the give and take of the conversation among Swift and the others. For instance, the NYT interviewer claims “lover” is a “polarizing” word “that gives some people the creeps.” The video doesn’t go into why, but in class, we do! I take this opportunity to ask students what he means—what is he not explaining but assumes we know about what seems creepy or polarizing? Grammatically, a lover is someone who loves. Why don’t we, like Swift, use this word in the day-to-day? Our nonuse of “lover” is also at play in the walk-down line. It contributes to what is surprising about its position at the end of the wait. “Lover” hits us as both old-fashioned (or what we might call “historical”) and kind of risqué, as if some salacious 1950s adultery scandal were in the air. Already the video is setting up the ways in which we are going to think about the origins, contexts, and connotations often carried around by particular words—their textures rather than their “meaning.”  

Being a medievalist by trade, aka someone who loves materials often considered old and outdated, I relish the opportunity to show my students how something so “now” needs to be considered in comparison to the literary tradition of “then.” And that is done with comparisons of Taylor Swift the love poet with some of the most important love poets of the past: Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Marlowe. Whether we think about Swift as someone who can write the feminine version of the Petrarchan plea or use the seductive tactics of Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd” in her own criminal conceits of “. . .Ready For It?,” I situate Swift in a long poetic tradition she transforms but also to which she more humbly belongs.  

Students who were quick to assert something new and special about Swift’s music are delighted to find that the new is built with the tools of genre, convention, and tradition. Even more, Swift’s contribution to those traditions makes her forebears compelling. I’ve had students turn to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, for example, in ways they would never have thought possible, energized by what Swift has only recently termed “Female Rage: The Musical” when she added a new set to the end of the Eras Tour. Swift’s work has given me new ways to demonstrate that the “outdated” is anything but that, as it thrives in our most recent tortured poet. 

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