Books A Perfect Rhyme A brand-new anthology of poetry takes goal at young fans of Taylor Swift.
Illustration by Logan Guo
Are pop lyrics poetry? Is a hotdog a sandwich? The concerns depend upon how you specify their terms. Numerous eaters concur, however, that hotdogs are food, which some are tasty. In the very same method, lots of listeners concur that Taylor Swift composes remarkable words, great to sing in the shower or (if you’re Swift) in front of record-breaking crowds. You may not call them poems– due to the fact that they need tunes and accompaniments to work their magic– however they do what well-known poems long utilized to do: They provide individuals by the thousands, or the numerous thousands, methods to reveal how we feel. Often my anxiety works the night shift too; often I, too, wish to seem like my partner’s old cardigan, or desire that I had someone’s image to burn.
When Swift informed us, on The Tortured Poets Departmentthat she was no Patti Smith, she implied that she wasn’t an innovative rebel, a hard rock genius who flouted dominating taste. Rather she’s more like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: not always a massive innovator however a master of her craft, and an authentic phenomenon in her own time, for factors that specialists may wish to comprehend.
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Specifically if– like me– they’re likewise Swifties. A few of us compose books and posts about her location amidst literary canons. A few of us attempt to compose, rather, about songwriting as its own art. And a minimum of among us– the British teacher Liz Ison– has actually now made her own anthology targeted at Swifties: not “The Anthology” (the name that Swift herself, confusingly, provided Disc 2 of The Tortured Poets Societyhowever an anthology appropriate, a collection of poems by different hands that may resonate with what Swift’s tunes do.
Poems for Tortured Souls— released in the U.S. by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers– emerges as being for Swifties of any ages, though the choices and product packaging recommend a present book targeted at youth. These poems come arranged by subject, with Swiftian overtones: “Love,” “Folklore,” “Peace,” “Revenge.” Robert Burns’ “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose” precedes; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Songs for individuals” (“Songs to delight the hearts of males / With more plentiful life”) last. In in between we get the one-time bestseller Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Emily Dickinson, and Claude McKay, and (less explicably) Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and the beginning from Shakespeare’s Romeo and JulietWe get L.M. Montgomery, the Anne of Green Gables author, with quatrains “thanking” her mortal opponent (compare Swift’s “thanK you aIMee”), and Emily Brontë, of Wuthering Heights popularity, declaring self-reliance: “I’ll stroll where my own nature would be leading: / It vexes me to select another guide.” And we get Charles Dickens’ appealing ballad of unavoidable decay,