Below is the foreword to the new anthology Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty and published by Ballantine Books.
The stadium fills. The anticipation and excitement are palpable. At last, the performer takes to the stage, greeted by thunderous applause. They will sing, perhaps solo, perhaps with a backing chorus. There will be dancing.
This is the origin of lyric poetry in the West over 2,500 years ago. As an integral part of the Olympic Games and other Panhellenic festivals, a celebrated composer of verse, such as Pindar or Bacchylides, would give a performance to remember. They would sing, with dance accompaniment, of heroes, of victors and victims, in a form known as the ode.
Poetry and song have always been associated. The plays of Shakespeare are punctuated with musical interludes—“In delay there lies no plenty, / Then come kiss me sweet and twenty: / Youth’s a stuff will not endure.” William Blake sang his lyrics—“Jerusalem” and “The Tyger.” Poetry intended for the page again and again invokes the spirit of music, as when John Keats writes an ode to the song of the nightingale or T. S. Eliot peppers The Waste Land with quotations from Richard Wagner’s epic music drama The Ring of the Nibelungen.
But can a mere songwriter, who does not intend to publish their lyrics, be called a poet? Of course they can. Poetry emerged out of the oral tradition and always returns to the rhythmic voice. Eyebrows were raised when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the ingenuity and durability of his lyrics deserved it: “The times they are a’changin’.” Dylan always began with interesting words and then found the music to go with them. With the Beatles, it was usually the opposite. In his book The Lyrics, Paul McCartney recalled that only once did the words come first: Even a ballad with such a strong narrative as “Eleanor Rigby” grew from a chord, not a story.
In this regard, Taylor Swift is more Dylan than McCartney. She has been writing poetry since she was a teenager. Her inspiration nearly always comes from a verbal idea. She writes out the words then creates the music, often with assistance from a collaborator. The poem, it may be said, precedes the song. In 2022, on accepting the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade award in Nashville, she spoke of her compositional method: In her mind, she said, the lyrics of each song belonged to one of three categories or, to use the literary term, genres. She gave them affectionate names, the Quill, the Fountain Pen, and the Glitter Gel Pen. She went on to explain that she doesn’t actually have a quill, though she joked that she did own one until she broke it in a fit of madness.