Release of Superstar’s “The Tortured Poets Department” Album Inspires Debate on the Definition of Poetry
4/24/24 – – Taylor Swift made history last week when she released her “The Tortured Poets Department” double album. With more than 300 million streams in one day, according to Spotify, the superstar’s 31-track opus became the most successful recording launch of all time.
But even before her most dedicated fans (Swifties) could listen to the songs, which have received mixed reviews, Swift’s representation of her work as “poetry” set off a heated international debate. Here’s what she posted Friday on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter):
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. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.
Highfalutin stuff. But can pop song lyrics be considered poetry? Is Taylor Swift a poet?
The discussion brought me back to my high school days and Morris Sweetkind’s English class. In a voice louder than necessary given the intimacy of our classroom — at Cheshire Academy in those days, six to 10 students, all boys wearing blazers and ties, sat at a large table with the teacher — Mr. Sweetkind opened the class one day with this question: “Gentlemen, what is poetry?”
As I recall, the answers were less than brilliant. My favorite, proffered by the guy sitting next to me was, “It’s what we’re going to read about in the next chapter of our textbook.”
Convinced of our cluelessness, Mr. Sweetkind informed us that poetry was all around us; even in the lyrics to the music we were listening to by Bob Dylan and John Lennon. In fact, ancient “lyric” poems were stories read aloud with the accompaniment of a lyre, the earliest known stringed musical instrument.
All literary genres are artistic forms of human expression, he explained. Forget the labels. We were going to focus on the elements of poetry, the figurative language “tools” used by poets: rhythm, imagery, diction, sound, symbol, tone and emotion, as well as metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, alliteration, allusion, etc.
Word-use qualifies as “poetic,” regardless of the format, when it touches our senses — sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. That was Mr. Sweetkind’s test.
We learned that poetic language is found in some literary genres more than others. To illustrate his point, he had us read the text of this short newspaper article that appeared decades earlier in the The Littleton Courier in Littleton, New Hampshire:
LITTLETON, Mar. 31 – – Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, one of the twin sons of Michael G. And Margaret Fitzgerald of Bethlehem, died at his home Thursday afternoon, March 24, as a result of an accident by which one of his hands was badly hurt in a sawing machine.
The young man was assisting in sawing up some wood in his own dooryard with a sawing machine and accidentally hit the loose pulley, causing the saw to descend upon his hand, cutting and lacerating it badly.
Raymond was taken into the house and a physician was immediately summoned, but he died very suddenly from the effects of the shock, which produced heart failure.
The article caught the attention of a neighbor, poet Robert Frost, who knew the Fitzgerald family. Mr. Sweetkind then had us read this very different recounting of the incident:
‘Out, Out—’
By Robert Frost
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Wow. What a difference. The news article, following classic “who, what, when and where” journalistic form, is devoid of figurative language. By design, no emotion or feelings. But Frost goes right for our senses.
Did you hear the buzz saw, see the mountains in the distance as the sun sets, smell the sweet-smelling wood? What about that snarling, rattling saw? Frost heightens the tension by giving it the qualities of a threatening beast (personification).
And to help express the despair and hopelessness he feels about the young boy’s life being cut short, Frost ends the poem abruptly and uses another poetic tool, allusion, in the poem’s title. ‘Out, Out’ is a reference to these lines by Macbeth after he learns of his wife’s death in Act 5, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Same facts. Two very different accounts and reader experiences. I and the guy sitting next to me began to understand the “poetic” tools Mr. Sweetkind was giving us to become stronger writers, be more effective communicators in any genre (including crisis communication), and better understand ourselves and the world around us.
Wall Street Journal music critic Mark Richardson was disappointed in “The Tortured Poets Department,” concluding, “The pop superstar’s lengthy new album is a logorrheic account of her personal dramas, with a shortage of the memorable hooks and accessible lyrics that made her famous.” (I had to look up the word “logorrheic.” According to Merriam Webster, it means “excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness.” Ouch.) Watch Swift’s new video “Fortnight” and see what you think.
Should Taylor Swift be taken seriously as a poet? Well, there’s a course available at Harvard called “Taylor Swift and Her World.” Focusing on her new release, I’m sure students will be debating the meaning and personal relevance of such lyrics as:
My boy only breaks his favorite toys
I’m queen of sand castles he destroys.
And expressing her reoccurring theme of unrequited love:
You shit-talked me under the table
Talking rings and talking cradles.
I wish I could unrecall
How much we almost had it all.
That may not be in a league with Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” but I’m prejudiced. If wonderful Mr. Sweetkind were still alive, I’m confident he would play Taylor Swift’s recordings in class and welcome her alongside Dylan and Lennon into The Tortured Poets Department. He’d be thrilled that in one day there were 300 million opportunities for an artist to share her expression of the human experience.
A final note: In the title to this blog I reference the first line of “How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)” by 19th century English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” I first read the poem in Mr. Sweetkind’s class.
Crisis Quotient Blog 