Taylor Swift the Romanticist

The excess is the point

The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) has finally arrived, and at its full 31 tracks, it is A LOT. I admit, even I had to take a break from the angst at one point before coming back around to listen. This is Taylor Swift at her Taylor Swiftiest, probing lovesickness and heartbreak with lyrical brilliance.

The album has already drawn some criticism that it is just too much. The title of The New York Times review was “On ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor” and that sentiment has been echoed elsewhere in the media.

Initially I was inclined to agree. Maybe Taylor had lost her edge and gone overboard. But then I realized this is Taylor Swift, she hardly ever does anything accidentally when it comes to her music. And then I listened some more.¹

And I realized, whether you like it or not, the excess is the point. Because on this album we’re getting Taylor Swift the Romanticist.

Romanticism 101

What I mean by that is Swift is deliberately evoking all sorts of tropes of Romanticism, the cultural movement of the 1800s. For a refresher on what we’re talking about here, I turn to Wikipedia:

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture during the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favor of a moral outlook known as individualism. They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form, but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response.

When we think of the Romantics, we’re talking William Wordsworth, the Shelleys (Mary and Percy), Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, etc.

In ways both obvious and subtle, Swift is evoking these artists and their ethos on TTPD

The Tortured Poet

The most obvious nod is the title of the project itself. The Romantics didn’t really coin the idea of the tortured poet/artist, but they definitely solidified it in the modern imagination. So many of these artists experienced wildly tragic lives (sometimes of their own making) yet also created magnificent, deeply feeling art. I think of someone like John Keats, a poetic genius yet penniless and dying tragically of tuberculosis at 25 (go watch the film Bright Star, I dare you).

On TTPD, Swift dons the mantle of the tortured poet, spilling her guts and bleeding her metaphorical heart out for us as she processes the raw details of love and loss.

All the Feels

Another mark of the Romantics was the primacy of emotion. Romanticism was a reaction to the Enlightenment focus on reason and empiricism. Not that the Romantics abandoned reason, they just put emotion front and center. William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” It’s interesting here that Wordsworth specifically refers to emotions recollected in tranquility, that is, after the event. Swift has some similar things today in her Instagram caption introducing TTPD:

An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time - one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.

The Romantic Bad Boy

Another trope that Swift evokes on the album reflects one of the darker sides of the Romantic movement, and that is the emergence of the Romantic bad boy—you know, he’s probably pale and dark haired and handsome and cultured, but also a bit of a hot mess. Think of someone like Lord Byron, a poetic genius but also a political and sexual libertine who lived a bit of a “no rules” life, and who contemporary Caroline Lamb famously called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.

When TTPD came out, many people were expecting Swift to share a lot about her long-term relationship with ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, but were surprised that quite a few songs had allusions to Matty Healey, lead singer of The 1975 that Swift had a short fling with early last year. At the time, their alleged relationship drew criticism because Healey has developed a bit of a reputation as an edgelord.

Healey is the perfect example of a modern man who presents as a Romantic bad boy: he’s an artist and songwriter, lead singer for a massively popular band that has drawn critical acclaim, but also has self-admittedly struggled with drug addiction, and as previously mentioned, has a reputation for controversy.

Mary and Percy Shelley

More specifically, Swift seems to evoke Mary and Percy Shelley in examining her past relationship with Healey. The Shelleys are the archetypal hot mess couple of the Romantic Era. When 22 year-old poet Percy Shelley met the precocious-yet-still-only-16-year-old Mary Godwin, he was already married with a child and a pregnant wife. Nevertheless Percy, who didn’t really believe in marriage anyway, wooed Mary and they ran off to France together, despite her father’s prohibition (“But Daddy, I Love Him” anyone?). Despite its impassioned beginning, Mary’s relationship to Percy was one heartbreak after another. As Meghan Harker writes:

While her work would make Mary Shelley the mother of modern science fiction and dystopian worlds, her marriage pretty much went rotten. Percy carried on what was at least a deeply emotional affair with his sister-in-law, his first wife committed suicide, the Godwin household came to financial ruin, which placed the burden on Mary, Percy began falling out of love with Mary… and then he drowned at sea.

Swift writes in her song “Fortnight”: “I love you, it’s ruining my life”, which sounds like something Mary Shelley could have easily written herself.

Despite Percy’s shitty treatment of her, Mary seemed to continue loving him even after his death, working to preserve his literary legacy, and if legend is to be believed, keeping his preserved heart (yes, his actual anatomical heart) in her desk until her death (so goth).

Swift evokes the same kinds of feelings about Healey on TTPD: you were a self-absorbed jerk who ghosted me but I loved you (probably in spite of better reason) and still maybe do a little bit.

If only to confirm this, Swift’s “Fortnight” music video with Post Malone, with its black and white imagery, 1800s clothing, and science lab scenes evokes strong Romanticist, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein vibes, at least to me:

In Conclusion…

Criticism that The Tortured Poets Department is a bloated, excessive, overwrought work in search of a good editor are certainly legitimate to make. I mean, there are people that don’t like the works of the Romantics. Time will tell where this album falls in the legacy of Taylor Swift’s corpus of work and pop music in general. But just know that the excess doesn’t seem to be accidental—it’s the whole conceit.

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1. This isn’t to say the album is above criticism. It’s to say that this common object of criticism about the album isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.