Is The Tortured Poets Department actually poetry? Experts weigh in

Taylor swift has always aligned herself with literature. Her discography is peppered with references to writers like F Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daphne du Maurier, Lewis Carroll, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. These nods, usually in song lyrics or music videos, were subtle, clearly the work of someone weaving intertextuality into her work to plumb more meaning from her own writing.

On her 11th album, swift has seemingly taken her love of literature further. Titled The Tortured Poets Department, the marketing for the record has relied on sepia-toned clips of typewriters, pop-up libraries (sponsored by Spotify) and lines of verse written by swift herself. She even went to declare herself the chairman of this fictional administrative office where, supposedly, poets and writers in pain could gather. And, two hours after the album was released, swift surprised fans with 15 additional songs under the collective title The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, bringing things to a total of 31 tracks (a reverse of swift’s favourite number 13). As swift put it: “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past 2 years and wanted to share it all with you.”

Is the work on Tortured Poets actually poetry, though? The evidence found on the record suggests not. Unlike, say, Kae Tempest or even Joni Mitchell, swift has mostly stuck to traditional pop formulas. Her lyrics are both a method for conveying meaning and narrative, but also as connective tissue in the mass of songwriting where lines seemingly exist solely to take us from verse to chorus. Even the content of the songs seems resistant to poet as a vocation. As she recalls saying to a lover on the album’s title track: “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Hardly the attitude of the next poet laureate.

In her career, swift does nothing by accident. What, then, are her literary intentions with The Tortured Poets Department? To figure it out, Dazed reached out to some experts to find an answer.

Dr Clio Doyle is a lecturer in early modern literature at Queen Mary University and the author Dear Reader: Taylor swift and the Idea of English Literature, due for publication in 2026. For them, swift’s utilisation of the word “anthology” to describe the 31-track extended album suggests she’s acting as curator rather than poet. “I think it’s an attempt to distance herself from being seen as a poet while still saying this is about poetry,” Doyle suggests. “Poetry is really a metaphor in this album. I think she’s talking about trying to present some version of what happened to her in this formal, structured, poetic way, and how that’s hard.”

Sasha Debevec-McKenney, a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books and whose collection POEMS will be published by Fitzcarraldo in 2025, agrees that swift isn’t necessarily working solely as poet on this album. “I’m not a poetry gatekeeper. Everyone can write a poem. I truly believe that, and include Taylor swift in that,” she says. “But these aren’t poems; they’re songs. They have choruses. They rhyme. I think there are conventions to being a songwriter that she’s always going to hold on to.”

That doesn’t mean that swift’s lyrics on Tortured Poets are failures. Debevec-McKenney, who also teaches poetry, says she feels that there’s “potential here for someone as a writer”. swift is taking chances on this record, “but I feel like she can’t kill her darlings,” Debevec-McKenney adds. “There are fun lines in here that are very sweet and sound nice, but they don’t contribute meaning. Cutting things is one of the hardest things to do as a poet. But I was reading these words thinking of her as a poetry student, and I think she’s becoming a better writer, and it’s just a matter of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.”

In her New York Times review, critic Lindsay Zoladz highlighted the “unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose” quality to the lyricism on Tortured Poets. This “clutter”, Doyle argues, is likely a deliberate narrative device. “The cumulative effect of it is that you feel like you’re getting the detail and texture of her life,” she adds, pointing to the song “The Bolter” (itself a reference to Idina Sackville, the inspiration for Fanny in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love) and a lyric from the title track where swift recalls a ring being put on her wedding ring finger as an example of a novelistic approach to songwriting. “She’s really concerned with how we are getting our information about her.”

The problem is that Taylor swift is both the subject and author of her work. “The thing I love about poems and writing poems is the distance between myself and the speaker of my poems,” Debevec-McKenney explains. “But swift is forced to live her life as the speaker of her poems. She’s trapped in them.”

It’s a reading she has often encouraged, leaving Easter eggs in the liner notes and music videos as to who or what a certain song might be about. And when the subjects of her songs are fictional, as they were on Folklore and Evermore, swift has felt it necessary to inform listeners. “It makes me a little sad,” Debevec-McKenney says, “but I think [The Tortured Poets Department] anticipates that we are going to be wondering [who these songs are about] even more than the other albums.” This is something swift has done to herself, but also something we continue to do to her. “Look at ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’ and the line ‘You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.’ It must be so lonely in some ways to be her.”

Doyle draws attention to the closing track of the anthology edition, “The Manuscript”, as a moment where swift attempts to force some narrative distance between herself and the subject of her songs. “How I read it is that swift is talking at first about this person – a ‘she’ – who wrote this manuscript about what happened to her. Her emotions are suddenly aligned with what happened and its moment of reconnecting with herself. Suddenly she’s talking about ‘me’ and ‘I’,” they say. “I think that what she's saying there is, ‘Fine I’m writing stories about other people, but these people are me in a way.’”

In her review for NPR, the critic Ann Powers said that swift was “pop’s leading writer of autofiction”, and Doyle agrees that her work could fit into that genre. “But I think that it’s important to remember that she is carefully crafting a fiction in which she’s inserting autobiographical details,” they say.

On songs like “But Daddy I Love Him”, “Clara Bow”, “The Manuscript” and the album’s title track, swift even appears to break the fourth wall. “I think there’s so much emotion and feeling in here,” says Debevec-McKenney, “but the most interesting thing to me is that question of ‘who am I?’ Who’s this story about? Who’s the real Taylor swift? All of those things are getting mixed up.” Maybe calling the album The Tortured Poets Department deliberately draws attention to the artifice at play, “like she’s saying, ‘This is an intentional experience. It’s writing. After all, poetry is legally fiction. Maybe it is an attempt to say, ‘I’m not your idea of Taylor swift.’”

swift is no stranger to metafiction (“Blank Space”; “Look What You Made Me Do”), but the sheer amount of swiftian lore stuffed into Tortured Poets can feel exhausting. But as biting lyrics regarding fan interference in her personal life on “But Daddy I Love Him” and the visage she says she presents on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” demonstrate, there’s tension between what swift is saying in the song and knowing it’ll be understood as autobiography. “She’s really playing with the awareness that people are going to see her revealing things about her life,” says Doyle. “She’s taking a perspective; she’s playing a character.”

Perhaps the meandering quality of Tortured Poets is a result of swift at odds with herself and the subject of the music she creates. “She’s writing about how hard it is to make art out of your life or to make art while you’re having a very dramatic moment in your life,” suggests Doyle. “I think that she has a lot to say about what it feels like to create art that is being so intensely scrutinised right now.”

Either way, Debevec-McKenney feels there’s growth from swift here. “I just want her to keep getting weirder, keep pushing herself,” she says. “I believe that she’s a good writer, and I will read everything she writes for the rest of her life. And every time I think I’m not going to, I do.”