What real-life ‘tortured poets’ think of Taylor Swift’s new album

Paul Muldoon

Love won and lost is no less a subject for Taylor Swift than for her namesake, Jonathan, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Here’s Dean Swift ‘On Stella’s Birthday 1719’:

Stella this Day is thirty four,
(We shan’t dispute a Year or more)
However Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy Size and Years are doubled,
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen
The brightest Virgin on the Green,
So little is thy Form declin’d
Made up so largely in thy Mind.

The wit on display in Jonathan Swift may also be glimpsed in Taylor Swift when she asserts in a couplet included in her new album’s ancillary material: “A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face. Because it’s the worst men that I write best.” As a poet who’s been tortured by some of the same things as Taylor – including whether Matty Healy of The 1975 is really worth the trouble – I know where she’s coming from. The title track begins:

You left your typewriter at my apartment
Straight from the tortured poets department

I fear this rhyme is less than inspired and she struggles with the phrasing of the second line. A kind way of putting this would be that the line is mimetic of the very contortedness it describes. That said, the refrain is much more assured:

I laughed in your face and said
“You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith
This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots”

As Jonathan Swift knew, poetry is a broad church and there’s plenty of room in it for a solid songwriter like Taylor Swift. At thirty four, the same age as Stella in the good Dean’s poem, she may well have it in her to write something really substantial. 

Paul Muldoon’s new collection, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, is published by Faber, £14.99

Camille Ralphs

Insufficiently tortured critics have disdained The Tortured Poets Department’s lyrics. Admittedly, “Your wife orders flowers / I wanna kill her” is not quite, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”. But there are bangers with the clangers, and classic ex-bashing like, “Who’s gonna love you, if not me? / Nobody” might pick up where Catullus’s Latin left off: “Whom will you love? Who’ll even have you?” (Camille’s translation). 

Swift quoted Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ in her 2020 single ‘tis the damn season. Here, her lyrically splendid Clara Bow, named for a forgotten Twenties movie star, is reminiscent of Frost’s ‘Provide, Provide’ (“The witch that came (the withered hag) / … / Was once the beauty Abishag, // The picture pride of Hollywood”). Its self-reflexive ending is especially affecting.

Despite the album’s teasing title, these songs genuinely work with, and against, the “tortured artist” archetype. In thanK you aIMee (sic), Swift sings, “When I count my scars there’s a moment of truth / There wouldn’t be this if there hadn’t been you”. “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart”? She wouldn’t write like this without one. 

Swift also knows there’s a fine line between living a life worth rhyming about and sabotaging it. It’s easy to forget. When the “carpe diem”/“miserere mei” moment’s passed, I return at seven whiskies in the morning, having unaccountably mislaid my glasses in the river, and think, well, maybe this isn’t the best way of writing a book. “You’re not Dylan Thomas, / I’m not Patti Smith, / …  / We’re two idiots”, indeed. 

Camille Ralphs’s After You Were, I Am is published by Faber, £12.99

Luke Kennard

I’ve always admired the way Swift was willing to visualise herself as a future disembodied wraith laughing from Hell at her disinherited in-laws. This is exactly the sort of thing I look for in writing. Painful self-awareness, elaborate set-ups and a touch of jouissance, that negative joy that keeps our engines turning over. “I’m the problem! C’est moi!” – it could have come directly from one of Baudelaire’s splenetic prose poems. 

Pleasing, then, to find her self-deprecating and lovesick against a backdrop of no less than 31 ecstatic Christmas carols. Poetry is always a tussle between our subjective lives, our broken hearts and the world as we perceive it. Here Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruin” reconfigured as “crucial evidence I didn’t imagine the whole thing”. Most of Eliot’s esoteric melancholy derived from doomed affairs. If you’re famous, though, it must be quite difficult to perceive the world at all; we all suffer from main character syndrome, but what if you quite literally are a main character and everyone tells you so?

I used to hate the idea of the tortured artist. Try being an auxiliary nurse! Try working in retail for half a day! We should all have time to practise our art and we should take great pleasure in it. The shopworn idea of a male poet as someone pathologically over-sensitive with floppy hair who allows himself the occasional roll-up and who always has a notebook; I rejected this image wholesale to the point where I’d often find myself deliberately without a notebook when having a notebook – or indeed a roll-up – would actually have been both useful and welcome.

But in my Forties I’ve realised that the torment comes from wondering whether you have any right to be a poet at all. Are you really contributing anything to society? You may have millions or, in my case, dozens of fans who like what you do, but maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they’re not very discerning. 

Every time you write you confront your soul and find it a small, pathetic, self-serving and essentially disingenuous creature. And at that point you just have to shrug, admit that it’s too late to commit to anything else, and open your notebook. To tilt my beret just so and paraphrase Sartre: In the end we must choose between impersonating what we are and nothing at all.

Luke Kennard’s 7^th poetry collection The Book of Jonah is forthcoming from Picador in 2025. Notes on the Sonnets (2021) is available from Penned in the Margins, £9.99

Dzifa Benson

If you’re an Ghanaian poet like me, the concept of ‘tortured poet’ feels like an indulgent western joke. Tay Tay’s global reign seems all-conquering but West Africans just aren’t feeling it. We’d rather dance to afrobeats, that other world-dominating musical entity, made by titans like Burna Boy. Imagine his unfiltered insights into the poetic merits of Ms Swift’s latest opus in pidgin English, a mode in which west Africans like to converse informally:

Tay Tay dey yarn stories well but make we no gass am up like she be di Poet of Our Generation. Sometimes her lyrics dey clunk and slow down di groove. 

Abeg o, wetin dis mean? “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever.” 

Or this: “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle / Brand-new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.”

E be like say these na di “poems” of one woman for her mid-30s? Na wa o, na only God fit explain dis kind matter. Ah, even di most tormented poets no fit flex unenlightened indulgence like “We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.”

Big ups to Florence and the Machine for coming through like superheroes on “Florida!!!”—we really need am to break di monotony of exes, quarrels, and all dat fame and mental health drama. I no go even start on all that synth-pop snoozefest!

Dzifa Benson’s debut poetry collection Monster is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in October 2024

Don Paterson

When my last book of poems dropped, flustered critics were left with only six months to review it. Understandably, not all of them got round to it. I should have gone with that photo of me in my pants. Flying in 15 extra poems would have been a mistake, though, since less is more in poetry, with the ideal number often being none. 

Anyway: I have had time to listen to the title track. It is very good. I have professional admirations. “Department/apartment”: generally, one should not rhyme amphibrachs before the stressed vowel, otherwise it’s technically rime riche, but she brazens it out. Ballsy move. Neat use of tmesis in “no-f-ing-body”. I have never seen a “tattooed golden retriever” outside of Dundee, but great simile. “Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist”, though? C’mon. He could only look small to Taylor. (Pedro Martins should be a bigger artist. Exactly.) 

And poets are tortured: today, I am struggling to reattach a curtain pelmet; tomorrow, the muse might switch to voicemail again. One unusually delicate flower in the New York Times, feels that Tay should not be making light of poets’ mental health problems. Since “making light” is literally how our accursed tribe gets by, good for her, I say. It’s of a piece with how she helps the young women of her fan-base counter their own daily torture-by-smartphone – with a self-aware wit and a positive message of self-actualisation. I won’t hear a word said against the lassie. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, these curtains won’t hang themselves, though at this rate I might. I’m sure the other 79 tracks are great too. 10/10.

Don Paterson’s memoir Toy Flights is published by Faber, £10.99