The album is titled The Tortured Poets Department and it extends among its mass audience (the swifties) a cliche that has always dogged poetry: the figure of the poet stuck in a permanent state of rapture, suffering, passion and decided unwellness.
Poets are beings who, in exchange for working the alchemy of turning ordinary language into something extraordinary, pay the price of emotional instability, like a curse. It is a long tradition that is not entirely true, because not all poetry is like this, nor are all poets like that (although some overact).
the many poets out there tend to torture their audience.
Swift's work was analyzed from a poetic point of view by students at Harvard University who had signed up for the undergraduate course Taylor Swift and Her World (yes, that course exists). The students were asked to compare her work with that of authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath and Willa Cather, which is some serious comparing.
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