July 2023 – Swifterature

The first bonus track of Taylor Swift’s 2022 album Midnights - featuring on the ‘3am edition’ - is titled ‘The Great War’. I remember listening to it in my kitchen as I stacked the dishwasher, an act of quotidian mundanity incongruously soundtracked by Swift’s passionate hymning of a relationship that, against the odds, survives a ‘great war’ of miscommunication, paranoia, distrust and past trauma only to come out stronger: ‘I vowed I would always be yours/’Cause we survived the Great War’. It features a veritable litany of figurative language in which love becomes a battle, heartbreak becomes death, emotional wounds literal bruises. So far, so Swift. But when the song reached the bridge, where Swift sings the lines, ‘We could plant a memory garden/Say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair’, I felt an uneasiness kicking in. What was strange is that I recognised it as a very specific kind of uneasiness, because I had felt it precisely once before.

Lately, my inbox is strewn (between the cute animal videos and instagrammable recipe content) with links sent by friends and colleagues to articles with titles such as ‘20 Taylor Swift songs with literary references you may have missed’ and ‘Taylor Swift’s songs are full of literary references - so what do they tell us?’ Since the 2020 release of Swift’s interlinked albums Folkore and Evermore, which she herself declared the product of being unable to stop telling stories as her imagination ran wild during lockdown, increasing interest has been paid to Swift as a self-consciously literary artist, whose works brim with references to everything from Alice in Wonderland to The Great Gatsby. Leading Shakespeare professor Jonathan Bate recently advocated for Taylor Swift as a ‘literary giant’ in The Sydney Morning Herald, the subtitle of his article declaring that he would ‘compare her (favourably) to the greats of poetry and prose’. Having long sent her eagle-eyed fans hunting for the famous ‘easter eggs’ with which she mischievously peppers her lyrics and videos, Swift’s work now seems to invite us on a quest to identify and collect her numerous literary allusions. Everyone from the Swiftie community on Reddit to English literature professors have eagerly risen to the challenge.