Taylor Swift and the Lyric Tradition

welcome everyone to close reading poetry my name is Adam Walker and today we are going to be reading some of Taylor Swift's lyrics Taylor Swift her her songs have gotten some literary attention of late and in fact I've I've had a couple requests on this channel and emails from people asking could I do something on Taylor Swift and I thought well why not uh a year or two ago I was teaching sections of Shakespeare and popular culture here at Harvard and the undergraduates there uh really showed me how how really connected Taylor Swift is to the lyric Traditions both into English and going all the way back to the classical lyricists such as the female poet safo and we we had great discussions pairing her her songs with some of the major themes in the in the plays of Shakespeare so I thought I'd do two things in this lecture the first is to see how Taylor Swift's lyrics respond to the kind of close reading that I do on this channel and then the second second is to locate Taylor Swift within this larger context of literary lyricists so let's look at her poetry its themes its images its ideas its conceits within the context of other lyric poets from the past because I think for a lot of a lot of the people who come to this channel they're interested in learning poetry they're interested in in where to start and where to begin and how to read poetry and I think it's best to always start with what's most familiar to learn your tastes and to go from there onward to new literary Discovery so I hope that this video helps you do that now when we talk about lyrics songs lyrics we're talking about the purely verbal component of the art form popular contemporary music involves many different kinds of art form there's performance on stage there's musical accompaniment there's lighting there is the music video which is its own form poetry might be described as the verbal art part of human life and experience inverse form and we know that poetry regulates itself differently from Pros such as the mode of writing in a novel or a newspaper Aristotle said there were three different kinds of poems there was the epic poem which a long narrative poem that follows the ...