Stephanie Burt is a Harvard professor of English, a poet and a literary critic who recently created and taught a course on ‘Taylor Swift and Her World’. This not only attracted an unusually high degree of student engagement but also international media attention, with, one suspects, greater measurable benefits for Burt and Harvard than for Swift. Now Burt has produced Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.
The title suggests the sort of literary and musicological analysis that has been devoted to singers such as Morrissey (most brilliantly by Gavin Hopps) and Bob Dylan. But Swift – for all the glancing references to Shakespearean characters and allusions to Robert Frost – is not, and doesn’t aspire to be, a literary songwriter. Poets are more of interest to Swift for the mythologies around them (the exilic Lake poets; tortured Sylvia Plath; tragic Dylan Thomas) than their literary techniques. Burt’s book does not, in any case, deliver that sort of analysis. It is instead a curious hybrid of slangy fangirl excitement and a veneer of scholarship. Literary and academic touches are deployed more for prestige than illumination.
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