The poet Haley Hodges has recently written a winsome essay for Cassandra Voices claiming that the Galactic Empress, Her Swiftiness, Queen of Ubiquity, is our “greatest confessional poet.” Let’s leave aside that Tay-Tay isn’t a poet—that song-writing and poetry-writing are different games with different rules—she is certainly a confessional, and one in the terms Hodges outlines. So far, so good. But I want to take issue with the hyperbolic praise in which that essay bathes the Golden Girl.
Haley Hodges views Taylor Swift as the greatest current exponent of confessional poetry, which is always a tightrope walk, a precarious style with precarious risks.https://t.co/mb6WmSp2RM#TaylorSwift
— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) January 20, 2025
One has, of course, to account for her success, and I do so by thinking of her as some latter-day Tennyson striding into the enormous gap left in literature by the passing of the Romantics. He became, despite his frequent mediocrity, the national poet simply because there was nothing else around—in much the same way that whatever show aired after Seinfeld in the era of broadcast television was bound to be popular simply because people couldn’t be bothered to get up and change the channel.
So it is with Miss Swift. Despite the fact that she can barely sing, play guitar, dance, or write songs, she has somehow become our late empire’s troubadour simply because, well, it seemed like we should have one, and she was there.
I will say, however, that she does seem to have both the sense and the good taste to enlist the talents of better musicians when she finds them as aides-de-camp. I don’t know whether there’s a real relationship here or if he’s just a hired gun, but in finding the guy from The National and letting him do his thing across a couple of her albums, she has shown shrewd awareness of the limits of her own powers. It’s just unfortunate, to me anyway, that she sings over it.
Also in the plus column for Miss Swift is something called “vibes,” which I have on good authority is how the youngsters are measuring musical quality these days. The alternative is to measure something like albums, songs, or performances, but I do have to admit that the vibes on an album like folklore—or even the new tortured poets record—are just right. The album art and production quality are suggestive of very specific kinds of scenes, which is to say, ways of being in the world that I think most people are quite hungry for. Perhaps it’s okay that music is serving a different role for this generation than it did for previous ones. Rather than, say, producing memorable songs that one might sing out loud with friends or tap one’s foot to in bars, Swift produces a kind of mood. If that mood is principally tepid, leftist, feminine revenge porn, well, what is that to me?
But actually, is such a posture all that new? Take punk music, for example. How many of those records are about posture—about a certain way of being in the world—more than they are, say, about musicianship or song-craft? Rather more than a few, I’d think.
In the end, I think of Miss Swift’s accomplishment like I think of the accomplishment of the McDonalds restauranteurs. The fare offered is easy and everywhere. It appeals to an extremely broad base of persons looking for an easy fix. There’s something uniquely American about both products. Some people, of course, may turn their noses up at both. At other times, though, it can be just the thing wanted—especially if it’s late, you’re tired, and hanging out with friends, and no one can think of where else to go.
No. I think the more apt literary key for understanding Swiftian appeal contra confessionals is the early novelists. Here’s the oft-forgotten American critic William Dean Howells on what the youngsters were then ingesting: bad writing that does “a great deal of harm in the world.” “[Figures like Swift]” he argues, “that heroine, [have] long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it.” (From “The Editor’s Study” 1887).
This is precisely Swift’s contribution to world culture, in my view. She works to elevate not-even-the-state-of, but the feeling of being in love to the ne plus ultra of human experience. Her obsession with dopey, high-school boys and floppy hair made sense when she was a teenaged songwriter, appealing mostly to other teens whose concerns tend to be similarly circumscribed. But I expected—I thought we all expected—that she’d grow out of them.
We were wrong. Her emotional range is the same. Her jealousies are the same. Her available subjects are the same now, in her 30’s, a billionaire, as they were walking past the lockers hoping to be noticed. That too would be fine; cases of arrested development are legion, except that she foists this worldview so broadly about. Thanks to her, several generations of women have been baptized into the shallow end of the kiddie pool, there to thrash about and encourage one another in their Mean Girls affectations.
I don’t know. At the beginning of his essay, Howells cautions about reading to much into these pulp offerings: “the [art] that aims merely to entertain—the [art] that is to serious fiction as the opera buffe…and the pantomime are to the true drama—need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply.” That’s probably right. That’s what she’s doing. It’s entertainment. We don’t have to take it so seriously. It’s what Liam Gallagher of Oasis once referred to as “junk food music.”
And there’s nothing wrong with a little junk food! This is America! Have some. Enjoy yourself. But let’s not make the category mistake of thinking it counts as cuisine.
