Taylor Swift for Classicists, Or: Love Elegy Today (Part I)

On The Tortured Poets Department's Classical allusions and complex poetic twists.

Let’s begin in the late middle of things. You have to wait until the 27th song of the 31 on Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, to find a sustained engagement with Greek myth. In Cassandra, the singer-poet uses the Trojan princess to muse on her own role as contemporary ignored prophetess. ‘So they killed Cassandra first/’cause she feared the worst’, the song’s chorus begins, and already I can hear the mordant disdain of a certain kind of classicist, sneering at popular culture. After all, Cassandra isn’t killed ‘first’; she survives Troy, only to be butchered by Clytemnestra. And she doesn’t ‘fear the worst’, she knows the worst, but is a victim of Apollo’s curse that no one believes her. But one doesn’t have to engage too hard with Swift’s songwriting to see she’ll have the last laugh on this kind of ‘criticism.’ My gambit, instead, is that listening to Swift, and engaging with her use of myth, is very much worth it, and using the filter of seeing her through a classicist’s eyes might be worth it too. Most criticism of Swift comes from pop-journalists, or self-proclaimed Swifties, who know her catalog inside out. Let’s try out a much broader view.

The idea of a song-writer poet writing a series of songs about unnamed or pseudo-named lovers, and having some fun at the attempts of listeners to map their words onto biographical realities, already throws us back into the world of love poetry, and especially Latin Love Elegy. One suspects there were many, back in the Augustan day, who didn’t pay much attention to the poems of Catullus (or Propertius, or Tibullus, or Ovid), and instead only gossiped about what the real identity of Lesbia (or Cynthia, or Delia, or Corinna) might be. Or perhaps, in the spirit of The Daily Mail, these ancient consumers of culture took delight in the gossip, while all the time pretending to disapprove of the poet/poems, and especially their politics. There is also an overlap in theme. Roman love overwrites the genre of loss and mourning with poems of love; as the cliché goes, you don’t write love poetry to someone present, but to someone absent, and this absence is often figured as death. This is Swiftian territory. So, starting with Cassandra, I’ll take a look at the lyrics in these lyric-driven songs, and see if a couplet on Cassandra can give us a window first into her use of myth (Part I) and then into her songwriting craft (Part II).

The first thing to notice in the Cassandra couplet is the certainty of the poet’s voice: ‘so they killed Cassandra first.’ She is sure why they killed Cassandra first, takes a stand, and interprets the myth in an entirely new way. She doesn’t bow before classical tradition; she rewrites it, much as Propertius calmly refers to obscure myths in his love poetry as if the meaning were obvious. This prophetic voice, which speaks from a position of immense certainty and power, occurs throughout Tortured Poets. Whether ridiculing the small-town hypocrisies of her past, mocking ex lovers, or those in the music industry who have judged her, Swift knows. Similarly she has no qualms about identifying with any iconic figures, not just Cassandra. Her experience of a ‘cosmic love’ in Down Bad makes her feel like the ‘chosen one’, a nod to the way love not only makes us feel we float above our previously dull life (love lifting us out of Plato’s cave), but also hinting that there is something religiously cultish about it: after the break-up, she feels she is the only one who believes in the ‘existence of you’, the alien outsider-lover who arrived almost the moment he disappeared. First offer certainty, then let the emotional cracks appear; that’s the formula. In Guilty as Sin?, on the brink of embracing a relationship she knows she will be judged for, she imagines herself as Jesus: ‘What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway.’ The idea of a relationship as a spiritual rebirth is hardly new, but Swift has picked her dramatic moment carefully. At first, the metaphor seems very loose. The rolling of the stone must refer to an embrace of a relationship, a moment of freedom. But in ‘crucify me’, she takes on the persona of Jesus, except that he has already been crucified. But perhaps she imagines Jesus choosing his rebirth, but that this choice only leads to a second crucifixion, a perpetual replaying of God’s game of sacrifice and renewal in her personal love-life. The lover’s choice becomes between the cold, anonymous, withdrawn space of the tomb, or an embrace of a love at the cost of another death-by-media.

Let’s take a brief detour into Propertius to witness something similar. In his opening poem, we find the poet madly and inappropriately in love, and unable to either win the girl, or obey normal social conventions. He contrasts his own failure with the success of the mythic hero Milanion (also known as Hippomenes), the eventual husband of Atalanta.

Milanion nullos fugiendo, Tulle, labores
saevitiam durae contudit Iasidos.
nam modo Partheniis amens errabat in antris,
ibat et hirsutas ille videre feras;
ille etiam Hylaei percussus vulnere rami
saucius Arcadiis rupibus ingemuit.
ergo velocem potuit domuisse puellam.

Milanion, Tullus, by fleeing no labors,
Crushed the savageness of the hard daughter of Iasos.
For one minute he wandered madly in Parthenian caves,
And went to confront hairy wild beasts.
That man, struck by a bounded from Hylaeus’ stick,
Groaned wounded on the Arcadian rocks.
Therefore he was able to tame the swift girl. (Prop 1.9-15)

If you’re puzzled by this, you should be. But let’s at least have a shot at unpacking it. In mentioning that the girl is swift, he references the major thread of the Atalanta story. Seeking to avoid sex/marriage, she agrees to her father’s terms: she’ll marry any suitor who outruns her in a race. The catch is that she’s impossible to catch. She’s too fast. But Milanion prays to Aphrodite, rarely a fan of humans who try to avoid sex, and the goddess gives him golden apples, which he is to strew before Atalanta as she runs. Delayed by stooping to pick them up, he wins the race and gets the girl. Propertius seems to replace the apples with the hysterical, staged groans of pain of her suitor. Staged pain becomes one of love’s strategies to get attention, to slow a fleeing lover down, though one the poet claims he is too sluggish (he is a victim of ‘tardus amor’) to copy, even as one might think of love poetry itself as just such a staging of groans of loss.

This is complicated enough, and the entire poem is a dizzying mix of chasing and fleeing. But near the poem’s end, Properitius comes back to Atalanta’s mythic race as he offers the poem’s moral: readers need to stick to conventional love, and avoid his own fate.

hoc, moneo, vitate malum: sua quemque moretur
cura, neque assueto mutet amore locum.

Avoid, I warn you this evil: let your own concerns
Delay each of you, and don’t change places from your conventional love.

‘Avoid this evil’, but also, in a cross-quantity pun, avoid this apple: the Latin word for ‘apple’ is mālum–malum, ‘evil’, but with a lengthened ‘a’. What does this pun, lurking in the deceptively simple advice, tell us? Is our poet identifying with Atalanta, giving her advice to help her beat the very trap he has himself set? ‘Stop for me! But don’t stop for me, avoid the apple, as we’ll only be caught up in an endless game of chasing and catching?’ Is it the neurotic fear of getting what he wants, and thus the end of the game he wants to avoid? Or is it advice to his former self, as if to beware of Aphrodite bearing apple-gifts? (I could spend time here on Propertius’ name, which the poet elsewhere has some fun with, as the first six letters give the stem of the Latin verb ‘to hurry’, ‘propero’–but that would be another story.)

Instead, lest we lose her from our sights, let’s return to Swift, whose songs exult in these kinds of love-games. But what seems new in Tortured Poets is the increase of her own sense of power, which at times becomes almost daemonic. This is not just a woman who writes songs, but one whose power spans the globe, whose presence on a tour can revive the economy of a city, whose political endorsement matters as much as anyone’s, and produces endless speculation. When her vocal screams Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, the title of a revenge song against a lifetime of criticism, and contrasts it with the threatening whisper of ‘you should be’, it’s genuinely frightening, not least because the emotion in her singing voice seems to eclipse whatever subject lurks underneath. Swift plays the modern Fury well. In So Long, London, she writes of the ending of a relationship lived out in London, but the goodbye is as much to the city she loved and will now miss and be missed by as much as the person: ‘So long London, you’ll find someone.’ This idea of a city as the hidden third in a romantic ménage-à-trois, who will miss her absence in a way that replaces the lover, is as grandiose as it is thrilling. Imagine if Ovid was Augustus, or Marcus Aurelius wrote love-poetry instead of self-importantly recycling stoic clichés, or better, used the love-poetry to work through all his emotions, dark and joyous, rather than separate them from his Imperial power, and you get some of the flavor of this.

But this voice of certainty (Cassandra’s certainty, mirrored in the certainty Swift has about Cassandra) is always linked to vulnerability. Cassandra was not believed, and for all her current power, this outsider status lingers throughout Swift’s songs. This duality spans the entire album, and can be figured in all sorts of ways. Her journey from insider show-business darling to outsider, alone and betrayed, or the woman-in-love femme fatale, all too aware of her sexual power, convinced she can get an ex-lover back (imgonnagetyouback)–except that this display of power seems to be too frenetically in denial of the original wound. Perhaps the best example is from Down Bad, where she flits between ‘cosmic love’, and acting out the ‘teenage petulance’ of not getting what she wants. Here, it feels like a blessing that Swift can laugh at herself. If the song has garnered fame for the record amount of f-bombs in a Swift song (‘F*** it if I can’t have him’ repeats) they are wonderfully appropriate: yes, petulant teens do swear when they can’t get what they want. Part of Swift’s popularity comes from the authenticity in the way she embraces, and takes seriously, these embarrassing emotions so many of us push to one side. Love, the 30-something Swift teaches us, makes teenagers of us all.

The Cassandra couplet itself, ostensibly about the artist’s personal sense of betrayal for truth, also resonates as broader social commentary–as many of the hooks in her songs do. The current US may tolerate optimistic prophets, but not pessimistic ones: ‘fearing the worst’ gets in the way of a narrative that wars are patriotic, progress is inevitable, and so anything wikileaks whistleblowers or climate Cassandras may say needs to be drowned out in patriotic hysteria, or P.R campaigns, until any particular truth no longer matters: ‘When the truth comes out, it’s quiet.’ No, Cassandra wasn’t killed at Troy, and most (though certainly not all) whistleblowers aren’t either. But speaking a pessimistic truth while being gaslighted by a society drunk on optimism is to experience a social death. Swift gives us a Cassandra for our times.

One could trace the idea of Cassandra, as silenced prophet, throughout Tortured Poets. She might be the founding member of a club Swift invites you to join. Like ancient poetry books, Swift’s songs can be heard in isolation, but don’t have to be; themes recur, language is repeated, ideas cross-referenced both within this album, and from previous albums. Her song-writing is a work-in-progress, a continual rewriting. The album’s 26th song is named Prophecy. In Cassandra, Swift stands above the myth, actively rewrites it to fit her life. But this is also a reaction to Prophecy, where she tries to rationalize her romantic failures by imagining herself the victim of a divine love-curse, which compels her to repeat her failures without being able to understand or change them. All the same, she still prays, to no one in particular, that it might end:

I guess a lesser woman would've lost hope
A greater woman wouldn't beg.

The specific, and painful, emotions of breakups, the manipulation of hope and hopelessness we’re used to feeling with the other person, the pleas we make to them (the hope against hope, the humiliating begging) are externalized, and thus made a touch less raw, into the mythic situation of a mortal praying to an inscrutable god. And after we listen to the next song, it is the kind of prayer we can easily imagine Cassandra herself uttering.

Prophecy also contains a mythic ‘mistake’ at the start:

And it was written, I got cursed like Eve got bitten.

What is Swift up to? Obviously Eve was not bitten, though there was a serpent, and a bite. The serpent beguiles her into tempting Adam to bite into forbidden fruit. This is not laziness or incompetence. Swift is a riddler, offering apparent nonsense up for interpretation, when there are no obvious right answers. She makes herself at home in the cultural stories broadly available to us, and takes for granted that this is at least part of what these stories are for: identify with Eve, or Cassandra, or Jesus, at any point in their stories, to see if it helps you make more sense of your story. If at times it leads you into interpretative rabbit holes, embrace them. So why was Eve ‘bitten’? I’m not sure. But I suspect she’s deliberately conflating Eve with Eurydice, a heroine who was bitten, and whose fatal wound caused her first separation from Orpheus on their wedding day. Perhaps the Orpheus who goes to Hades to find her, but looks back, and thus loses her again, is just continuing the curse (or prophecy) of that bite. And if we look back one more song, to I Look in People’s Windows, we find a contemporary heroine missing a lost love, and ‘looking through people’s windows’ to other worlds, not so much in the hope of getting that love back, but simply to get one last glimpse, as Orpheus did: ‘What if your eyes looked up and met mine/One more time?’

The references to antiquity also fulfill a function within Tortured Poets. They act as a bridge between the small-town world of her childhood, a world she is constantly running away from, and her current life as singer-poet. But if she uses the language of classical allusion to signpost her difference from her past, she also uses it to return to it, explain it, and in so doing, relive the intensity of teen coming-of-age. This neurotic sense of always ending up in the place you are running away from haunts the album, and gives it something of the flavor of the ‘born-to-run’ theme of early Springsteen songs. In So High School, she imagines a new love giddily taking her back to her highschool years:

Truth, dare, spin bottle
You know how to ball, I know Aristotle

Shared teenage games lead into a conventional mixing of opposites, small town bro-who-balls and smart-chick-philosopher whose wisdom spans the ages. For all that the song exults in the joy of these opposites attracting, one can still almost anticipate the extra-poetic relationship moment when girl has to explain Aristotle (or who Aristotle was) to baller boy. A similar ambivalence haunts Alchemy, an earlier love-song about the irresistible chemistry between opposites. Except, of course, that chemistry is not alchemy; the extra excitement bought by the magical idea of ‘alchemy’ is paid for in the lurking awareness that none of it is real. These songs make you want to believe in happy endings, even as you can’t stop doubting the existence of them.

Tortured Poets is still, just about, an album of pop songs, but with ongoing, complex poetic twists. There are songs that are never as simple as, say, Madonna’s True Blue. Instead, Swift lures us into murkier emotional territory, and mythic allusions are central to that. What I find most interesting about ‘Swifties’ is that their heroine is not just creating a base of fans, but a base of interpreters, who not only consume music, but engage in collective efforts to understand it. I suspect everything I’ve said here has already been said, in some form, on one of the hundreds of internet forums where Swifties live, probing the nuance of her lyrics. And this should make the average classicist, or literary critic, very happy.