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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<\/em>\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,\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u2019s impact is undeniable. It redefined Swift\u2019s public perception, ushering her into a new era of literary acclaim and\u00a0critical gravitas. With its committed character studies and time-swept details,\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u00a0cast Swift as a kind of poet laureate of pandemic-era reflection.<\/p>\n 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. Wordsworth and Coleridge\u2019s\u00a0Lyrical Ballads,<\/em>\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. 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 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\u2019s mark of mastery: a Grammy award.<\/p>\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. In her \u201ccardigan\u201d music video and live\u00a0folklore<\/em>\u00a0performances, Swift echoes this tradition, invoking Thoreau\u2019s 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 \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<\/em>\u00a0collaborator Bon Iver, to acclaim. 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.<\/em>\u00a0One 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. 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<\/em>\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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":83086,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-taylor-swifts"],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\nSwift borrows from \u2018the man\u2019 to land legacy status<\/h2>\n