A hurricane with my name when it came.
New AP Taylor Swift podcast Summer School episode: Ecocriticism + "The Tortured Poets Department," out now!
On this week’s Summer School episode, we’re going back to Episode 7: Ecocriticism. We’ll cover how Taylor Swift uses nature language, imagery, and metaphors to capture the feelings and emotions she’s trying to convey in her songs on “The Tortured Poets Department.” From exploring nature vs cities, the idea of the civilized vs uncivilized, and ecofeminism, “The Tortured Poets Department” has a lot for us to work with!
🎥 Sneak Peek
This week’s extra credit - Brought to you by Jodi
Whenever I talk to someone about our podcast’s premise (always! be! marketing!), I inevitably hear “Literary analysis—that’s a pretty different take on Taylor Swift!” While it’s true we’re different because we don’t talk about gossip, rumors, or Taylor’s life aside from what we learn from her directly or in her lyrics, comparing Taylor’s music to literature isn’t a stretch. Like literary works, Taylor uses themes, rhetorical devices, and narrative structure in her music to make her stories more impactful. I love looking at Ecocriticism as a lens for Taylor’s music because as was the first literary theory we covered on the podcast in Episode 7, this framework opened my eyes to a new way of exploring Taylor’s lyrics. I want to use this Extra Credit to compare some of the songs we cover today to other literary works and see how they use nature and the environment to tell their stories.
“Florida” by Lauren Groff and “Florida!!!”
Lauren Groff captures the diversity of people, experiences, and perspectives in the state of Florida in her collection of short stories also called, “Florida”. The book’s description brings the environmental elements highlighted throughout the stories front and center:
Lauren Groff brings the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild--a place where the hazards of the natural world lie waiting to pounce, yet the greatest threats and mysteries are still of an emotional, psychological nature….The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence.
As I read (ehm, listened to—I love an audiobook!) I was immediately struck by the way Groff uses nature and the environment to describe the state itself:
"Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning."
"a damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things."
The stories are dark, emotional, and complicated, similar to the dark, emotional, and complicated story Taylor Swift weaves in her song of the same name (albeit with three !!!). Taylor, too, captures the heat, swamps, and hurricanes of Florida, using these natural elements to convey the complexity of escaping your past and attempting to run away from it all, only to end up in an equally dark and complicated place.
“You can beat the heat if you beat the charges too”
“I did my best to lay to rest/ All of the bodies that have ever been on my body / And in my mind they sink into a swamp”
Both the book and the song showcase Florida as a place of intrigue and darkness and leave you with more questions than answers about the people who live there.
“Peter Pan” by J.M. Barrie and “Peter”
While most of us were introduced to Peter Pan via the Disney animated classic, the Peter Pan story we know today was first introduced as a play written by J.M. Barrie, staged in London in 1904, and then adapted to the story Peter and Wendy in 1911. The story centers on Peter as a symbol of escapism and youthful innocence. Neverland is portrayed as a natural, free world where children can escape the terrible fate of adulthood: work, rules, and bedtimes. While Neverland is fictional, the nature elements used to describe Neverland mean the environment is what gives the place its feelings of freedom, escapism, and possibility. While most Peter Pan books are illustrated to bring Neverland to life, descriptions of Neverland are mostly vague, encouraging readers to use their imaginations. For example, the Mermaid’s Lagoon is described as such:
If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.
Neverland’s imaginary qualities and natural elements also serve as a strong contrast to the world these children are escaping from: London during peak industrialization.
In the song “Peter,” Taylor uses nature imagery to both recreate the feelings of childhood and provide tension between childhood freedom and the stressful realities of adulthood. “In closest like cedar / Preserved from when we were just kids” at the beginning of the song immediately creates this tension—cedar wood, very natural, yet in a closet to preserve precious clothing from moths.
“You said you were gonna grow up Then you were gonna come find me Words from the mouths of babes Promises, oceans deep But never to keep”
Repeated in the chorus, “You said you were gonna grow up” confirms the Peter the speaker is talking to is Peter Pan, of Neverland fame. However, those “Promises, ocean deep” were broken, snapping the speaker out of the fantasy of Neverland and back to reality. The chorus frames for us that this is a song about lost innocence, and lost love, something the speaker thought she could have but realizes now, likely as an adult reflecting on memories, that she cannot have. The nature imagery in the song has a nostalgic and fantastical feeling— cedar, jet stream, oceans deep, galaxies—all reflective of the nature elements in Peter Pan. The song ends back in the industrialized, adult world: “But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light,” closing the chapter on the narrator’s childhood dreams, confirming the “promises, ocean deep” were not kept.
“Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf and “Clara Bow”
This may be the least likely pairing, but also my favorite. In our episode this week Jenn focuses on the line from “Clara Bow,” “did you know you’d be picked like a rose.” Jenn examines the metaphor of being picked like a rose to refer to being selected as a young, fresh new face in Hollywood. However, picking a rose kills it—limiting its growth, its potential, and taking control of its destiny, much like what happens to young women in Hollywood. This single rose symbolizes the young women in the song and foreshadows what will happen to them in the industry.
Similarly, Virginia Woolf imbues flowers with layers of meaning and metaphor in “Mrs. Dalloway,” using this imagery to add layers and depth to the characters and the story itself. The novel opens with the famous line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Right away, we learn through these flowers that the main character has agency and a sense of autonomy—not a given for women in 19th-century England. Flowers are used throughout the novel as a way of communicating without speaking. It’s not just the individual floral species that have meanings in Victorian floriography (the language of flowers); color, presentation, number, and assortment all impart different meanings. For example, Elizabeth is often compared to “hyacinths and garden lilies” (134). Symbolically, this comparison shows Elizabeth’s growth from a child into a woman. However, the meanings of these flowers also characterize her as impetuous and active (hyacinth), as well as pure of heart (lilies).
Is “The Tortured Poets Department” an Ecocritical Album?
When Taylor announced “The Tortured Poets Department” back in February, one of the first questions I had was “Which poets?” From this week’s analysis, perhaps we can say Taylor continues to be influenced by the Romantic poets, for whom the environment played a monumental role in their work: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, et al. Her song The Albatross on TTPD directly references Coleridge’s work The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The music video for Fortnight plays with Frankenstein imagery, a nod to Mary Shelley. Coupled with the 6 additional songs we cover on this week’s episode, it’s safe to say Taylor continues to be influenced by, and in conversation with, the Romantic poets, and analyzing her work as we do theirs will likely continue to help us understand the stories she’s telling and provide new perspectives on her work.