{"id":82606,"date":"2025-07-25T07:04:19","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T07:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new365.azontree.com\/?p=82606"},"modified":"2025-07-25T07:04:19","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T07:04:19","slug":"taylor-swifts-folklore-5-years-later-who-gets-to-be-a-pop-music-poet-laureate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new365.azontree.com\/?p=82606","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift\u2019s Folklore, 5 Years Later: Who Gets to Be a Pop Music Poet Laureate?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In this op-ed, writer and teacher Dr. Jenny Henderson reflects on Taylor Swift\u2019s\u00a0folklore<\/em> on its fifth anniversary.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"Taylor<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Photo by Beth Garrabrant\/Courtesy of Taylor Swift<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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Five years ago, in the stir-crazy swelter of COVID-19 lockdown, I clung to one ritual: long drives along Massachusetts\u2019s North Shore with Taylor Swift\u2019s\u00a0album\u00a0folklore\u00a0on repeat.<\/p>\n

Salt air on my Chevy Cruze door, Swift\u2019s guitar-woven fables became my salve. I wasn\u2019t quite \u201cdoing good\u201d or \u201con some new sh*t,\u201d as Swift\u2019s narrator claims in the opener, but for the album\u2019s hour-and-seven-minute duration, I felt something close to okay.<\/p>\n

A half-decade later, folklore\u2019s impact is undeniable. It redefined Swift\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

But I wonder: Would the album have received the same\u00a0praise if it hadn\u2019t aligned itself with a Walden-esque, cabin-in-the-woods aesthetic?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Swift retreated into the pastoral forest to craft her masterpiece, she tapped into a literary tradition historically defined by white, male, solitary geniuses.<\/p>\n

Folklore<\/em>\u00a0transformed her legacy \u2014 but did it also reinforce outdated ideas about who gets to be seen as a \u201cserious\u201d artist?<\/p>\n

From the Lake District to Swift\u2019s Long Pond cabin<\/h2>\n

Last spring, I was a teaching assistant for\u00a0Harvard University\u2019s\u00a0viral\u00a0\u201cTaylor Swift and Her World\u201d course.<\/p>\n

The class,\u00a0housed in the English department, paired Swift\u2019s discography with poets including Sylvia Plath, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Professor Stephanie Burt\u2019s lectures unpacked the storytelling skill and literary allusions woven throughout Swift\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

Still, it wasn\u2019t until\u00a0folklore \u2014<\/em>\u00a0where Swift styled herself to match aesthetic notions of British and American Romanticism \u2014 that broader society bought her literary merit.<\/p>\n

Studied Swifties know that \u201cthe lakes,\u201d\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u2019s bonus track, refers to England\u2019s Lake District, where celebrated poets, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth, resided at the beginning of the 19th<\/sup> century. Swift even nods to Wordsworth on the song when she sings that some \u201csleaze\u201d can\u2019t tell her \u201cwhat are [her] words\u2019 worth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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British Romanticism\u00a0prized self-expression and discovery\u00a0through encounters with art and nature. The \u201cLake Poets\u201d broke free from the logic and reason of the Enlightenment era to seek the sublime.<\/p>\n

Wordsworth and Coleridge\u2019s\u00a0Lyrical Ballads,\u00a0for instance, married lyrical, first-person perspective with exaltations of the natural world.<\/p>\n

American artists, eager to stake their claim on the cultural moment, seized the spirit of British Romanticism and made it their own.<\/p>\n

While England\u2019s 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 \u2014 one entwined with possession, land, and an unyielding pursuit of individualist \u201cfreedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Often\u00a0considered the first real artistic movement in U.S. history,\u00a0American Romanticism came to codify an enduring image of American literary greatness through white male settlers\u2019 quests for meaning and eminence.<\/p>\n

By evoking the same style, Swift earned herself a modern poet’s mark of mastery: a Grammy award.<\/p>\n

Swift borrows from \u2018the man\u2019 to land legacy status<\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve long left the age of American Romanticism, but its influence persists in our cultural scripts around genius and credibility.<\/p>\n

In U.S. culture, legacy is often equated with singularity. Our artistic canon is filled with tales of masterpieces born from creative isolation.<\/p>\n

In her \u201ccardigan\u201d music video and live\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u00a0performances, Swift echoes this tradition, invoking Thoreau\u2019s iconic secluded, evergreen cabin.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 even though she does have major collaborators in Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff \u2014 of her woodsy fantasy, much like the American Romantics.<\/p>\n

In doing so, Swift resuscitates Romantic aesthetic and, more contemporarily, the time-honored scenario that propelled male musicians, like\u00a0folklore\u00a0collaborator Bon Iver, to acclaim.<\/p>\n

After a breakup, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver\u2019s singer-songwriter) famously locked himself in his own remote, timber-frame cabin to write and record his breakthrough debut album\u00a0For Emma, Forever Ago.<\/p>\n

One critic even directly likened Vernon\u2019s retreat to Thoreau\u2019s.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just Swift\u2019s cabin that rehearses the individualist creative myth. The album\u2019s 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\u2019s vastness.<\/p>\n

The \u201ccardigan\u201d music video even features a landscape painting by Swift herself,\u00a0in the style of artists like Caspar David Friedrich, one of Romantic portraiture\u2019s pioneers.<\/p>\n

But the ability to retreat into nature is luxury, one that was made acutely visible in the summer of\u00a0folklore\u2019s release, when upper-middle class families embarked on leisurely state park vacations, while essential workers faced daily risks. As many artists, including Black photographer\u00a0Carrie Mae Weems, have investigated in their work, the silhouetted image of a person confidently exploring nature is historically a symbol of wealth and whiteness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Swift\u2019s collaborators on\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u00a0fit the same aesthetic. As a proud Ohioan and longtime fan of\u00a0The National,<\/em>\u00a0I love Aaron Dessner.<\/p>\n

But I couldn\u2019t help but cringe while watching the\u00a0Long Pond Studio Sessions<\/em>\u00a0documentary, 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\u2019 narrow ideal of excellence?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s genius in girlhood, too<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

On\u00a0folklore, Swift transfigured herself into a cottagecore poet, borrowing from imagery inseparable from its legacy of romantic individualism, whiteness, and maleness.<\/p>\n

As we await Swift\u2019s next era, it\u2019s worth considering how her immense privilege enables her to move fluidly across genres. When\u00a0Beyonc\u00e9 reclaimed country with\u00a0Cowboy Carter,\u00a0she didn’t receive the same mainstream praise as Swift.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

All of this isn\u2019t to dismiss\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 I still love it as much as I did in the summer of 2020. Plus, it\u2019s not like I\u2019m above the cottagecore-liberalist impulses that guide the album: I mean, wasn\u2019t I doing literally same thing on the shore-ringed open road when I \u2014 a privileged, solo woman \u2014 sought refuge in Swift\u2019s lyricism from the cozy solitude of my sedan?<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s worth asking why this album, and not others like\u00a0Red\u00a0or\u00a0Speak Now, earned Swift the \u201cliterary\u201d label. And what does that say about which voices \u2014 and which visuals \u2014 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\u2019s so often a group project?) Would the music industry\u00a0be quicker to celebrate SZA, for example, as a lyrical genius?<\/p>\n

As a treat for the final week of \u201cTaylor Swift\u201d class, I had my discussion section rank Swift\u2019s albums March-Madness-style. Almost unanimously, they selected\u00a0Speak Now<\/em>\u00a0as their favorite era.\u00a0Speak Now<\/em>\u00a0is Swift\u2019s sole entirely self-written album, which both exhibits her career-spanning storytelling prowess and foreshadows\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u2019s preoccupation with authorial control.<\/p>\n

If I had to guess based on our discussions, however, my students most adored\u00a0Speak Now<\/em>\u00a0because its ferocious and fantastical candor spoke most vividly to the glitter and guts of their girlhoods.<\/p>\n

It was genius to them \u2014 no Thoreau-cosplay needed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this op-ed, writer and teacher Dr. Jenny Henderson reflects on Taylor Swift\u2019s\u00a0folklore on its fifth anniversary. 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