In a Harvard Gazette report this week, we read about the ability of the famous singer Taylor Swift to adapt to the worlds of the English poets of the Romantic era. In one of her lectures, Professor Stephanie Burt asked her students to think about their role as listeners to the song “Fifteen,” in which Swift presented herself as a girl expressing adolescence and friendship with poignant lyrics.
Burt compared the meditative qualities of the song with the English poet Wordsworth’s 1798 poem, “Tintern Abbey.”
The students received the lesson with positive feedback, sitting in their classrooms listening intently, and occasionally laughing when Burt made internal references to Swift’s fans. This was the largest course Burt had ever taught, and also the largest in the arts and humanities field at Harvard this spring.
The course curriculum is organized according to the “periods” of Swift’s career, with students examining themes of fan culture, fame, adolescence, and maturity, along with songs by other artists and literary writings.
Burt noted that she looked forward to students gaining not only a deeper appreciation for Swift, but also a new set of tools for literary and cultural analysis of the works of major classics.
In an interview before the lecture, Burt said, “The best way to get someone interested (in students) is to connect them to something they already like.
“I think we will find that more Harvard students will read Alexander Pope (d. 1744), because he is in Taylor Swift’s course, than if he only appears in courses about people who have been absent from our world for centuries.” She added: “Poetry usually means works of art that use words intended to be read on the printed page, and do not need to be read aloud by the writer. Writing songs means writing for tone and resonance. “It is writing that singers translate.”
Burt explained that the course “presents Swift as a songwriter rather than a poet, because creative music writing and singing is an independent literary form, requiring different skills than writing text.”
Burt noted that songwriting is decoded on the piano during the lesson.
While some critics may not consider singer Taylor Swift worthy of classical analysis for an English literature course, Burt disagrees: “Half of the English writers who we now consider classic, highbrow, serious were underrated in their time, because they were… They were famous, and they were popular, presenting kitsch, populist art.”
*Visiting researcher at Harvard University
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