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.
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.
