‘The Tortured Poets Department’ academically analyzed: Taylor Swift professor (UGent) examines the pop star’s latest album

The Tortured Poets Department listens like Swift’s diary

“What struck me most is the intense vulnerability of the album. It’s very raw. It feels like a passage from a personal diary, from a memoir, or from what we read in literature stream of consciousness to call. I think she sat down, wrote down her feelings and then simply put them to music without much rewriting. It is certainly her most personal and vulnerable album.”

What the critic of The New York Times As far as Swift is concerned, Swift could have edited her diary a little more strictly – with 31 songs on the track list and a playing time of 2 hours 2 minutes, The Tortured Poets Department a long sit. “I don’t think it’s ever a bad thing to have more Taylor. There are songs on it The Tortured Poets Department which people say are unnecessary, but I think that’s the point,” says McCausland.

“This is an album about personal trauma, about very difficult feelings, about a difficult period in someone’s life. And when you’re going through all those emotions, when you’re on such an emotional rollercoaster, some people will say that your feelings are silly or not productive. I wonder if she deliberately left some of those less catchy, less good songs on the album, to make it clear that there are highs and lows in life. Maybe that wasn’t her intention, but that’s how I feel.”

This is Swift at her literary best

Swift previously said that she has three pens to write her songs: a fountain pen, a glitter pen and a quill. Just by the title The Tortured Poets Department Experts claim that she wrote her eleventh album with that quill.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say it doesn’t have glitter pen numbers on it, but I disagree. As far as I’m concerned, ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ is one, and perhaps ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ too. But I think the album is a mix of the fountain pen and the quill pen. The fountain pen for diary-like pieces, the quill pen for songs that refer to historical writers or old traditions.”

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and punk poet Patti Smith gets a mention on the title song, but which poets does Swift still refer to? “She quotes Shakespeare – “a rose by any other name” (on ‘The Albatross’, EWC). She also clearly refers to the novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett in ‘I Hate It Here’.

But it’s not just about specific poets: often it’s more the atmosphere of the album that is reminiscent of British Romantic authors. And there are a lot of echoes of Sylvia Plath in it – not direct references, but the tone of the album: the confessional, the echoes of depression and mental health struggles is very Sylvia Plath.

“Taylor has always been very open about her influences, but she has The Tortured Poets Department filled with so many references, to other people, places, musicians, artists, writers, that it is deliberately overwhelming,” the professor explains.

“It’s the musical equivalent of TS Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, which is often taught: it is consciously, how should I put it, impenetrable. There are so many references that it gets confusing. She does something similar here: her music is a product of everything she has been influenced by, but at the same time it is completely unique.”

Swift puts her critics and her fans in their place

“What also struck me is how directly she addresses both her fans and her critics. She has done that before, in songs like ‘Shake It Off’ and many songs on her album Reputation (2017), but now we see that even more clearly. In the song ‘But Daddy, I Love Him’, for example, but also ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’ and ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’. I see those songs as a kind of trilogy. I think they belong together, where Swift makes it clear that she is fed up with what people think of her – not just her critics, but also her fans, who care about her but can also behave quite psychotically at times.”

The American magazine Paste chose to conceal who wrote their negative review The Tortured Poets Department had written because the critic who reviewed her album Foliage (2019) had discussed was threatened by Swifties.

Fans of Swift had also written the pop star an open letter when she had a brief romance with Matty Healy, the much-talked-about, foul-mouthed frontman of The 1975, because of “actions and controversies that we found problematic,” as they wrote in an open letter. “I think it’s really interesting and surprising how abruptly she reprimands her fans for the way they’re behaving,” McCausland says.

“I’ve also noticed that a lot of the response to The Tortured Poets Department in the press and from fans is quite obsessive about the question: who is which song about? I find that very ironic, because that is exactly what she asks us not to do, to stop doing that. People will always do it, but she is clearly tired of it, the toll that fame has taken. You see that in a lot of songs on the album – I think it’s her most explicit reflection on what fame and the music industry do to you.”