Is This Poetry or Pop Music? How The Tortured Poets Department Straddles High and Low Culture

The best poets have always done this: they intertwine the most powerful allusions with the muddiest, most mundane details, putting the eternal and the ephemeral into constant conversation.

Dante did this throughout the Divine Comedy, for example, making Virgil his guide (Virgil, the poet’s poet), and then taking specific jabs at small-time politicians from his hometown, citing times he felt slighted by his contemporaries. That’s what makes his medieval poem modern. For seven centuries, scholars have been unraveling that work by decoding names and making connections to the smallest turns of phrase. (Sound like anyone you know?)

Artists, in turn, have been able to take his work that spans from what historically has been considered High culture–references to religion and the Bible, for example–to the low. Dante’s Commedia inspired canonical, highly-symbolic artists like Salvador Dalí and lesser known, lesser-praised creators like John Carpenter, the director of Escape from L.A., which borrowed heavily from Inferno for its imagery. And both works are deepened by their connection to the great poem.

A great work can do this–span the breadth of humanity and envelope all that we love about obscure, thought-provoking art and all that we revel in or gawk at in the lowest forms of art too.

More than any other Taylor Swift album so far, The Tortured Poets Department epitomizes this span from high culture to low. It constantly asks us to undermine our ideas of what makes something poetry or art. It asks us deliberately and relentlessly: is this poetry or pop music? What is the distinction? Why does it bother you? Let’s take a look at exactly how this happens on the album.

Title

Before any note of music begins, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) is, by far, the longest title in the Taylor Swift œuvre. It asks to stand out. Look at the list:

Taylor Swift

Fearless

Speak Now

Red

1989

reputation

Lover

folklore

evermore

Midnights

The Tortured Poets Department

This title says, “I am an outlier. I am not like the others.” The other titles ask to be taken more seriously. What was more serious than calling an album Red as in opposition to the iconic Joni Mitchell album Blue? What is more serious than calling an album the elegantly-titled folklore or evermore? These albums had titles that a poet would give them. No serious poet would invoke Poetry in the title of the work. Calling the album The Tortured Poets Department already feels low enough.

Of course, it has its own allusions. As fans have pointed out, it alludes to Joe Alwyn’s text chain with some other actor friends called The Tortured Men’s Club, and it matches nicely with The Dead Poet’s Society, a comparison which Swift further encourages by having actors Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles feature in the “Fortnight” music video. Dead Poet’s Society is a great film about people reading poetry, so it’s a natural connection for even those most unfamiliar with the literary allusions.

Swift has been calling herself the “Chairman” of the Tortured Poets Department since first releasing news of the album back in February, when she was scooping up her Grammys for Midnights. So she takes a leadership role. She’s not just calling herself a poet; she’s calling herself Chairman of the Poets.

This is a bold step for a woman. Sure, women have always been “allowed” to write poetry–of all the arts, this was the one the patriarchy probably promoted most in women, though it had to be poetry of a certain ilk. Phyllis Wheatley’s letters to God, for example, were allowed. But a lot of poetry is not considered womanly even now.

On previous albums, Swift has referenced the Romantics as the pinnacle of poetry, perhaps even the kind of eloquence toward which she herself strives. These are poets: Keats, dying of consumption in Rome, looking out the window at the Spanish steps. Shelley and Wordsworth and Donne and Shakespeare: Poets. Men.

Taylor might have called this album “The Tortured Women’s Department,” further drawing the comparison to Alwyn’s text chain, or commenting on how much of the album is deeply feminist. Instead, she chooses “Poets” where women have always been second fiddle. She already invited critique just by calling herself one of them.

I personally think the title is also meant to be playful, tongue-in-cheek. It’s so overly serious that it out-seriouses itself, especially on an album that features lines like “all my friends smell like weed or little babies” or “I’m having his baby–no I’m not! But you should see your faces!” We are not meant to take this as seriously as the marketing would make it seem–right? Because no serious poet puts “Poets” in the title of the work. And look at the photo of her on the front of “The Anthology.” It’s a figure from Rodin’s Gates of Hell (further drawing in comparison to The Divine Comedy). What is she trying to do here, looking so twisted, like a woman turned into an olive tree?

So already, even before entering the album, you have to check your biases. You’re being told exactly what you’re getting, and at the same time it’s doing so in a way that we find so overt as to be unserious or hyperbolic. I have already seen op-eds saying that TTPD needs an editor (NYTimes) and that it is an unnecessary slant at Joe, who is already sad enough (certainly seems he is very sad from the rest of the album). “This is my teenage, tortured poetry,” she says. It’s absolutely “low culture.” It’s not really poetry. Is this something all listeners will believe?

You can always take her at face value. Taylor can always be read literally with great satisfaction. But we must never forget it is she who crafts the narrative. Who is the mastermind. Who leaves nothing to chance.

The Tortured Poets Department (Track)

So let’s head straight for the title track, because this is where we’ll find obvious evidence of her use of high and low culture on this album.

Read literally–and as I say, we can read the whole thing literally with great satisfaction–the Swiftesque narrator of this album leaves one sad, safe relationship for a shiny, brightly-burning lover from her past. Swifties will read the sad, safe relationship as her 6 years with actor Joe Alwyn and her white-hot love affair as the rebound with the frontman from The 1975, Matty Healy. I’m just going to call it out because that’s how people are reading it, even though I think it’s a pretty banal and boring reading of the album.

Still, without a doubt, the narrator of the album pits one relationship against the other in contrast several times, particularly in terms of a dichotomy of being safe but locked away with being free yet being on fire.

My question is: who leaves the typewriter?

The opening lines of the song are as follows:

You left your typewriter at my apartment

Straight from the Tortured Poets Department

I think some things I never say,

Like, Who uses typewriters anyway?

We would assume at first blush–okay, I would assume–that the safe lover (i.e. the “Joe” character) leaves the typewriter, because he is the one who called his club the Tortured Mens Club and we know he is the one who wrote parts of “betty” and “champagne problems.”

But in the second half of the first verse contradicts this idea–painting the self-sabotaging lover who is having an “episode.” Mental health is an important theme on this album, one of the deepest and most complex issues of our time and a significant part of the depth of these songs specifically. But it also helps to know that Swift absolutely loves to watch TV and has always been a devoted television binge-watcher, which she speaks about in a way to lovingly tease herself. So we can see that she is glued to the screen, invoking something we consider “low” culture: television. In this instance, she is using a single word to have double meaning, both high and low at once.

I don’t want to leave the image of the typewriter too soon. It’s important to note that Healy’s band, The 1975, is named after a letter written by Jack Kerouac. Whether you consider Jack Kerouac of high or low culture is a matter of taste. There are some who find him extremely poetic and others (ahem, me) who find him a male chauvinist who inspires douchebaggery across the country. He symbolically holds high and low culture at once, as someone who claimed to be living an “authentic” life out on the road, a Beat Poet without the need for the literary stamp of approval. Jack Kerouac also, famously, of course, wrote his entire manuscript for his best-known book, On the Road, on a single 150-foot scroll on a typewriter.

“First thought, best thought,” he was known for saying, banging away as if at a drum.

So when the narrator of the song, “The Tortured Poets Department” says, “I think some things I never say, like, Who uses typewriters anyway?” We are meant to laugh at this. We are meant to laugh at the fact that not only is she telling us, out loud, that she thinks some things she “never” says (let’s step even further back and notice how she is blasting this out, across the world, in a song) but that the question she puts forward is one of playful mockery: Who uses typewriters, anyway?

Serious poets, of course, that’s who!

Are you not serious, Taylor? And where do you write? This holy and sacred act of creation? Don’t tell me it’s–gasp! — the Notes app of your phone?

So this is important because it invokes the hypocrisy that how you write, or where you write, has any bearing on whether or not what you produce is actually worthwhile, right?

This theme is further explored in the chorus of the song:

You’re not Dylan Thomas

I’m not Patti Smith

This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel

We’re modern idiots

I hope you’re starting to see my point: This isn’t serious art, because she’s literally telling us, in the chorus of the song, not to take it seriously. She is beating you to the punch. There have been reviews of this album saying it isn’t poetic enough, that poetry is supposed to be sparse and spare and this album is too verbose, that it isn’t self-aware enough, that it hasn’t been honed.

But she beat you to the punch.

She told you, on the title track, that this is not high poetry. Literally, we’re idiots.

Each of the poets she invokes are Certified Greats, right? Dylan Thomas was the “doomed” poet, born into World War I, living through World War II, seeing death and destruction, writing the kind of sparse and spare poetry Swift’s critics will use against her to criticize her. He is, like Donne and Shakespeare and Wordsworth before him, a Poet.

And Patti Smith–who among us has not read Just Kids and wished to be this kind of artist? Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir chronicles her youth as she felt called to poetry and an artistic life. I mean, who is more serious than Patti Smith? She had altars and talismans and she slept on the streets of New York and she had lovers and she wrote her poems and performed them to punk music and she starts every one of her instagram captions with “this is.”

She is invoking two great poets to draw the comparison and to say, “This is not like that.”

And then the rest of the album keeps the listener wondering if that can possibly be so. If this is not like that, then why am I still singing along?

And the song continues this way. The beginning of the second verse says, “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” Listeners of The 1975 will notice the invocation of chocolate as a reference to one of the band’s songs, the first ever use of the word “chocolate” in Taylor’s published writing. For our purposes here, we need to notice how Charlie Puth gets mentioned alongside Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith. We are being asked to crumble our hierarchies of artistry. We are being asked to see how this is a matter of aesthetics. Charlie Puth has a classical background, after all. He trained at Berklee College of Music. Perhaps Taylor, whose education has always been more experiential than academic, is drawing this comparison too.

The end of the title track “The Tortured Poets Department” lands on, “Who else decodes you?” and this question is an invitation. It’s an invitation to a listener who is constantly being asked to decode. It’s a wink from the master coder, whose patterns and mind games and Easter eggs are never fully cracked.

Child’s Play and the Question of Genius

There are many more instances of the same question on the album. The next track, “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” uses the metaphor of a child playing with toys to describe the pain inflicted by an unpredictable lover on another. Although at first ambiguous about whether these toys are meant to be Barbie and Ken–or do we all just have Barbie on the brain since last summer? — she uses a direct allusion in the final lines of the song, singing, “I felt more when we played pretend / Than with all the Kens.”

The song itself is sort of a silly idea, right? It’s saying, I’m a doll and he’s playing with me, and I feel used and mistreated and dismembered. It’s kind of a low-level use of metaphor, yet it brings us back into conversation with all the questions we’ve been asking since last summer: Is it art? Is it art if it’s about Barbie? Is it art if it’s about women? Is “she” a genius? Can genius be a woman? Can we make poetry about something mundane, about something “low”?

Likewise, listeners recognized the echoes of Barbie in “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” later on the album. Barbie has an existential realization at the beginning of the film when she is at a dance party in a glittery, sequin outfit, where she proclaims that every day is the “best day ever!” and “even Wednesdays!” Barbie then asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” and the party comes to a screeching halt.

It’s hard not to see “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” as a representation of the same image, where a woman in a glittery costume sings, “Lights, camera, bitch smile / even when you wanna die.” One of the most iconic lines of the album is “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day.” Swift could write this sentiment (and has written it) many other ways. In Fortnight, the same idea is expressed as “All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.” Is that not poetic? Yet we can see that there is value in saying it in different ways, in different contexts, at different moments. But some we celebrate, and others we say, “That’s too childish,” or, “That’s too simplistic,” or, “That can’t be true because you’re famous so you should be happy.”

As Barbie (both the film and the doll herself) moves deeper into the past, she gains new meanings. As the layers compound and human experience compounds, she is no longer just a doll but a representation of the values and expression of different eras in history. She literally climbs the ladder from low culture to high culture.

“Time, doesn’t it give some perspective?”

I can’t believe these are still aesthetic questions we have to grapple with, but of course we did, all last summer and then during awards season. I think what Swift brings in here is an important question: what if Barbie were not just an idea or a symbol or even a story but a living person, manifested in the modern-day pop star (like herself)?

Florida!!! and So Long, London

Swift has a history of invoking places to create a specific atmosphere (an essay unto itself), but on TTPD, the places she invokes are primarily Florida and London. These places are also representative of the theme of high and low culture. London, of course, is a cosmopolitan city, one of the greatest in the world, a place that has given birth to many great literary traditions. Nearly every street corner commemorates the accomplishments of some writerly Englishman there. You could fill lifetimes with the amount of culture and high art there is to experience in the city.

And Florida? Well, aside from the fact that it’s also literally a lot farther south than London, it’s important to notice that Florida is known for things like the “Florida man” challenge, where you google the words “Florida man” and your birthday and will inevitably find something outrageous that happened in that swampy state. In fact, the song “Florida!!!” relies heavily on Florida’s reputation as a place where people go to escape when they’ve committed murder. I’m thinking of books like Lauren Groff’s Florida stories and Gun Love by Jennifer Clement–themselves high art about the lowest state. These books show the sinister darkness of the place, a land of contrasts. The land of Disney World, but not necessarily known, as London is, for its culture.

This is not a fully-formed argument, but perhaps these places tell us something about the contrasting lovers on the album as well. Critics are saying that Swift did the safe, sad character a disservice on the album–but in the comparison with the places, he is the London, and the unsafe, wild lover is the Florida person. The safe, sad lover inspires some of the best writing on the album–he is the depth of thought, the commitment to the years they had together, all that long time she had to process him and his place in her life.

The unsafe, wild lover, by contrast, inspires some of the shallower or more absurd metaphors in her writing, such as the alien abduction in “Down Bad.” There is a reason that high culture is so high, of course. And that’s because it continues to unwind and unravel meanings long after works of lesser quality and thought. But that’s not patently true, and this album is constantly in conversation with these ideas.

Conclusion

Reviews of “The Tortured Poets Department” have been mixed, and it’s my opinion that Taylor Swift knew after the record-breaking year she had, she would be on an inevitable downswing in 2024. She took the opportunity to step ahead of the press and call out their critiques of her, anticipating what they would say: that this is not high art, that she shouldn’t dare call her pop music poetry.

Yet Charlie Puth himself called Taylor Swift a “genius” in 2021. Unquestionably, The Tortured Poets Department does what any other great work of literature does: it speaks to culture at every level, bringing the modern and the classic into conversation with one another. There are moments on TTPD that are absolutely unserious. There are sounds, such as in the song “Robin,” that sound decidedly somber, yet the line sings, “You look ridiculous, and you have no idea.”

This is exactly what the conversation and contrast of high and low culture on the album seeks to spark: what are your value judgments? Where do you want to draw these lines? Do sound and subject have to coincide? The playfulness of the album comes full circle in her little jokes and winks, littered throughout. Oh we’re absolutely serious. Dead serious. No, really. Insisting to the point of suspicion. Insisting beyond the point of necessity to bring us back around to doubt.

What has always appealed to me about Swift’s work is that it tends to cut through obfuscating language and get to the heart of the feeling. It never relied on poetics in the traditional sense. “You belong with me;” so simple yet so punchy. And she continues to do this in her work, even now, even as it layers and builds, becoming more and more complex, a constant fluctuation between high and low.

So, are we meant to take it seriously as poetry? That’s for the listener to decide.