Taylor Swift’s ‘Tortured Poets Department’ Is More Puzzling Than Poetic

A mere two hours after Taylor Swift released the highly anticipated “The Tortured Poets Department” on Friday, the singer-songwriter revealed the compilation is actually a double album. Fifteen additional tracks — the album was originally 16 songs — completed “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.”

Fans already knew special edition CDs/vinyls of “TTPD” would include four bonus songs, marketed as exclusive to the respective physical copies of the album. (However, the bonus tracks — “The Black Dog,” “The Albatross,” “The Bolter” and “The Manuscript”— are all available now.) This is not the first time that Swift has peddled the idea of rarified access to her music in order to make more money, regardless of the fact that she is now a verified billionaire.

If the first half of the album is an uneven, synth-filled confessional, the back half is an indulgent, half-hearted attempt to position herself as a tortured poet who has fully mastered her literary craft with the album’s title and marketing. An anthology, in a traditional sense, is a selection of work connected by an overarching theme or topic. But with the addition of “The Anthology” to the original album, these 31 songs are not so much a carefully curated selection, but more so proof of an inability to show healthy discretion in her work.

Two weeks prior to the release of “TTPD,” Swift released five playlists on Apple Music aligned with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Prior to the release of the album, the playlists were comprised of her old songs, but they now contain songs from “TTPD” neatly organized into their respective categories. 

“The Anthology” begins with a continuation of her collaboration with Jack Antonoff — who after many successful songs, has reached a plateau when it comes to working with Swift: “The Black Dog” (filed under anger) and “imgonnagetyouback” (filed under denial) are both tracks about struggling to move on from a relationship. “The Black Dog” is a song tinged with hurt and betrayal, slowly building from soft verses to an explosive chorus; it also contains a classic Swift frustration with her ex-lovers’ eagerness to date women of a much younger age. She sings, “In The Black Dog, when someone plays ‘The Starting Line’ / And you jump up, but she’s too young to know this song / That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming.” In a different vein, “imgonnagetyouback” — one of a few oddly styled titles on the album — is a catchy, pulsing depiction of desperation and delusion, declaring, “Even if it’s handcuffed, I’m leaving here with you.”

“The Albatross” is reminiscent of “folklore’s” “mad woman,” an allegory of a wild and destructive woman who men long to tame. Arguably one of her most poetic songs on the album, with a Shakespearean allusion in “A rose by any other name is a scandal,” Swift abruptly takes listeners out of the picture she’s painting with the addition of a very modern reference in “Wise men once read fake news / And they believed it.” The inclusion of timely cultural markers is something she does throughout the album, taking away from the immortality of her music; if a song is purposely timely, it dooms itself to feeling outdated down the line. 

Much of “The Anthology” is created with The National’s Aaron Dessner, her other frequent co-collaborator. He contributes to four songs on “TTPD” and 12 on “The Anthology.” While Dessner has worked on some of my favorite Swift songs (“right where you left me” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” to name a couple), many of his collaborations on “The Anthology” blur together in a bland, wordy mush. “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” “Peter” and “Robin” are unmemorable, with simple, repetitive melodies that dull the listener rather than invigorate them. Jam-packed with an abundance of flowery language, a lot is said without actually saying anything at all; cursory knowledge of how to use a thesaurus does not a poet make.

When it comes to Swift’s music, I often think of a concept introduced by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers on their podcast Las Culturistas: Taylor Swift vs. Tayla Swiff. In their analysis of “folklore” and “evermore,” they posit that at her best, Swift portrays her genuine self in her music, exuding raw emotion and vulnerability. At other times, she leans too far into Tayla Swiff (the name they have given her public persona), and tries to wink at her listeners that she’s in on the joke of her celebrity, or worse, garner pity for her struggles as one of the most powerful women in the world. Tayla is alive and well on “The Anthology”: She writes of the hyper-attention on her breakups, saying, “Come one, come all / It’s happenin’ again / The empathetic hunger descends” in “How Did It End?” and in “The Prophecy,” she claims, “Don’t want money / Just someone who wants my company” (see earlier paragraph about the rollout of this album’s vinyls).

At times, Swift’s lyricism on this album is more puzzling than it is poetic. In “So High School,” her ode to the feeling of giddy teenage love is depicted in the lines “Truth, dare, spin bottles / You know how to ball, I know Aristotle / Brand new, full throttle / Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” It seems as if knowledge of one of the most influential philosophers of our time is now a manic pixie dream girl trait. Nothing is more baffling than the second verse of her escapist “I Hate It Here,” which recalls “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid.” It’s a stunningly tone-deaf remark, especially coming from someone who spent last summer openly dating a man with documented racist remarks.

What would a Swift album be without a revenge track? Although her 2017 album “Reputation” addressed her ongoing feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, she is still clearly ruminating on it in 2024. Her song about being the victim of a bully is called “thanK you aIMee,” explicitly stylized to expose the object of her torment. It could also be argued that “Cassandra” is about Kardashian and West as well, with Swift implying similarity between her and the mythological woman who was cursed by Apollo to know the truth but never be believed.

A common criticism from Swifties is how the exaggerated public interest in the subjects of her songs takes away from her artistry, but Swift has not earned that privacy. She plays into the drama, like with the styling of “thanK you aIMee”; an artist can’t create an album steeped in their lore as a celebrity and then play victim when people analyze the lyrics. In fact, that’s how most poetry explication exercises work.

A recent piece in The Cut asks what poets think of “TTPD.” 

“I think a part of writing poetry is observing things and being honest,” poet Emily Alexander told the magazine. “Can you do that if you have billions of dollars? I find it sort of hard to imagine someone with that many resources being able to get to some sort of truth about the human experience.”  

A lack of authenticity and honesty is the common thread throughout this album, but what also excludes Swift from being the tortured poet she claims to be is her need to produce her work in excess. A true poet is not only tortured by the world around them, but they are also tortured by whether their words are worth putting into the world. Do they speak to a greater meaning? Are they original? There is an inherent art in being concise, and Swift could stand to learn the power of precision.

That’s not to say that Swift is incapable of poetic lyricism — previous songs like “ivy” or “the lakes” exhibit her word-wielding at its best. However, by self-reflexively calling this album poetry, she has painted herself into a corner, incapable of delivering on a lofty promise of tortured and contemplative literary prowess.