Five years ago, in the stir-crazy swelter of COVID-19 lockdown, I clung to one ritual: long drives along Massachusetts’s North Shore with Taylor Swift’s album folklore on repeat.
Salt air on my Chevy Cruze door, Swift’s guitar-woven fables became my salve. I wasn’t quite “doing good” or “on some new sh*t,” as Swift’s narrator claims in the opener, but for the album’s hour-and-seven-minute duration, I felt something close to okay.
A half-decade later, folklore’s impact is undeniable. It redefined Swift’s public perception, ushering her into a new era of literary acclaim and critical gravitas. With its committed character studies and time-swept details, folklore cast Swift as a kind of poet laureate of pandemic-era reflection.
But I wonder: Would the album have received the same praise if it hadn’t aligned itself with a Walden-esque, cabin-in-the-woods aesthetic?
When Swift retreated into the pastoral forest to craft her masterpiece, she tapped into a literary tradition historically defined by white, male, solitary geniuses.
Folklore transformed her legacy — but did it also reinforce outdated ideas about who gets to be seen as a “serious” artist?
From the Lake District to Swift’s Long Pond cabin
Last spring, I was a teaching assistant for Harvard University’s viral “Taylor Swift and Her World” course.
The class, housed in the English department, paired Swift’s discography with poets including Sylvia Plath, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Professor Stephanie Burt’s lectures unpacked the storytelling skill and literary allusions woven throughout Swift’s career.
Still, it wasn’t until folklore — where Swift styled herself to match aesthetic notions of British and American Romanticism — that broader society bought her literary merit.
Studied Swifties know that “the lakes,” folklore’s bonus track, refers to England’s Lake District, where celebrated poets, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth, resided at the beginning of the 19th century. Swift even nods to Wordsworth on the song when she sings that some “sleaze” can’t tell her “what are [her] words’ worth.”
British Romanticism prized self-expression and discovery through encounters with art and nature. The “Lake Poets” broke free from the logic and reason of the Enlightenment era to seek the sublime.
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, for instance, married lyrical, first-person perspective with exaltations of the natural world.
American artists, eager to stake their claim on the cultural moment, seized the spirit of British Romanticism and made it their own.
While England’s Romantic poets took inspiration from folk ballads, Greek mythology, and medieval tales of elfin creatures, American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau honed their own Romantic vocabulary — one entwined with possession, land, and an unyielding pursuit of individualist “freedom.”
Often considered the first real artistic movement in U.S. history, American Romanticism came to codify an enduring image of American literary greatness through white male settlers’ quests for meaning and eminence.
By evoking the same style, Swift earned herself a modern poet’s mark of mastery: a Grammy award.
Swift borrows from ‘the man’ to land legacy status
We’ve long left the age of American Romanticism, but its influence persists in our cultural scripts around genius and credibility.
In U.S. culture, legacy is often equated with singularity. Our artistic canon is filled with tales of masterpieces born from creative isolation.
In her “cardigan” music video and live folklore performances, Swift echoes this tradition, invoking Thoreau’s iconic secluded, evergreen cabin.
From a weather-worn cottage of her own design, Swift perches against a moss-thatched roof and in front of a lantern-lit piano, locating herself as the lone author — even though she does have major collaborators in Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff — of her woodsy fantasy, much like the American Romantics.
In doing so, Swift resuscitates Romantic aesthetic and, more contemporarily, the time-honored scenario that propelled male musicians, like folklore collaborator Bon Iver, to acclaim.
After a breakup, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver’s singer-songwriter) famously locked himself in his own remote, timber-frame cabin to write and record his breakthrough debut album For Emma, Forever Ago.
One critic even directly likened Vernon’s retreat to Thoreau’s.
It isn’t just Swift’s cabin that rehearses the individualist creative myth. The album’s cover visually decouples the project from Swift, the pop icon, and presents a singular figure lost in her thoughts and the woods. The black-and-white image subtly suggests Romantic portraits of solitary figures confronting nature’s vastness.
The “cardigan” music video even features a landscape painting by Swift herself, in the style of artists like Caspar David Friedrich, one of Romantic portraiture’s pioneers.
But the ability to retreat into nature is luxury, one that was made acutely visible in the summer of folklore’s release, when upper-middle class families embarked on leisurely state park vacations, while essential workers faced daily risks. As many artists, including Black photographer Carrie Mae Weems, have investigated in their work, the silhouetted image of a person confidently exploring nature is historically a symbol of wealth and whiteness.
Swift’s collaborators on folklore fit the same aesthetic. As a proud Ohioan and longtime fan of The National, I love Aaron Dessner.
But I couldn’t help but cringe while watching the Long Pond Studio Sessions documentary, in which Swift and white, male, indie artists (Dessner and Jack Antonoff) gather around a crackling fire near a rustic cabin to pontificate. How far have we really come from the Romantics’ narrow ideal of excellence?
There’s genius in girlhood, too
Swift is no doubt a brilliant songwriter and businesswoman. Much of her success stems from her ability to reinvent herself across genres, while maintaining her clear, confessional voice.
On folklore, Swift transfigured herself into a cottagecore poet, borrowing from imagery inseparable from its legacy of romantic individualism, whiteness, and maleness.
As we await Swift’s next era, it’s worth considering how her immense privilege enables her to move fluidly across genres. When Beyoncé reclaimed country with Cowboy Carter, she didn’t receive the same mainstream praise as Swift.
Still, that Swift must endlessly reinvent herself to remain relevant also speaks to the pressures placed on female pop stars. Her reinvention is strategy as much as survival mechanism.
All of this isn’t to dismiss folklore — I still love it as much as I did in the summer of 2020. Plus, it’s not like I’m above the cottagecore-liberalist impulses that guide the album: I mean, wasn’t I doing literally same thing on the shore-ringed open road when I — a privileged, solo woman — sought refuge in Swift’s lyricism from the cozy solitude of my sedan?
But it’s worth asking why this album, and not others like Red or Speak Now, earned Swift the “literary” label. And what does that say about which voices — and which visuals — get coded as genius in American pop culture? What might pop look like if it moved beyond the myth of the lone white auteur altogether? (Especially since the reality of pop music is that it’s so often a group project?) Would the music industry be quicker to celebrate SZA, for example, as a lyrical genius?
As a treat for the final week of “Taylor Swift” class, I had my discussion section rank Swift’s albums March-Madness-style. Almost unanimously, they selected Speak Now as their favorite era. Speak Now is Swift’s sole entirely self-written album, which both exhibits her career-spanning storytelling prowess and foreshadows folklore’s preoccupation with authorial control.
If I had to guess based on our discussions, however, my students most adored Speak Now because its ferocious and fantastical candor spoke most vividly to the glitter and guts of their girlhoods.
It was genius to them — no Thoreau-cosplay needed.
