Taylor Swift by the Book

November 15, 2024
Searching for meaning in a pop star's songs. "Taylor Swift doesn't just write bops, she writesintellectual bops," write the authors of this lively and smart look at the pop star. "Her music is a master class in literary allusion and a survey course in some of the greatest works of English literature." That's a weighty declaration to live up to, but the authors--one of whom, Feder, is an English professor--gamely live up to the challenge. First, they describe the three "pens" or styles that Swift uses to write: a glitter gel pen for bubbly top 40 hits, a quill pen for songs that "read as poetry, rich with metaphor," and a fountain pen for her confessional "peek inside my diary" songs. Then they dive into Swift's oeuvre, album by album, dividing them into eight eras: Bildungsroman, Fairy Tale, Modernist, Decadent, Sentimentalist, Romantic, Gothic, and Postmodernist. The authors pore over Swift's lyrics, connecting them to Sappho, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare, and others. In Swift'sMidnights album (Gothic Era), for example, the authors look at the lyric "my town was a wasteland" from the song "Midnight Rain" and observe that it "calls to mind T.S. Eliot's epic poem, 'The Waste Land.'" They also share playlists of Swift songs based on motifs such as "Madwoman" and "Metatextuality" and brief bios of writers who may have influenced Swift, including Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas. The authors encourage further reading. If you love Swift's album1989, they recommend you readLunch Poems by Frank O'Hara and Edith Warton'sThe Age of Innocence. Charming pen-and-ink illustrations enhance the pleasure. For hardcore Swifties or neophytes, an accessible and incisive analysis of a star's appeal.

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