Taylor Swift has quietly created a cultural monopoly. Reissues of her albums dominate the charts. Her concerts are major events. Now the Hachette-owned Headline Publishing Group has announced Invisible Strings, a Swift-themed poetry anthology. Contributing poets include Ilya Kaminsky, Richard Siken, and Pulitzer winner Diane Seuss. Each featured work correlates to one of 113 songs from Swift’s discography; the reader is asked to “match each poem to the song it is a response to.” It might be jarring to some that the anthology’s editor is referred to in promotional material as a “genuine Swiftie,” or that the book’s release date is in early December – optimal timing for Christmas shoppers. But the Swift sceptics should look past this and focus on its democratic potential.
One literary critic on my Twitter feed mocked the invitation to actively participate in matching Swift songs to poems. “As a fan of picture books and wordsearches, I can’t wait!” he said. But highbrow criticism often comes in wordsearch form. For a model, one only needs to read Mary McCarthy’s 1962 review of Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov’s cryptic verse novel. “A cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself kit,” she calls it. McCarthy spends painstaking hours disentangling anagrams, picking out autobiographical themes, and identifying supposed mythological and Shakespearean links. The reader focuses with her and eventually shares in her enlightenment – about Nabokov and Pale Fire, but also about the shape and size of a larger literary canon.
Taylor Swift teaches her fans the same skill. Legions of young women perform close readings of their idol’s song lyrics, album credits, and Instagram posts, which Swift uses as a Kabbalistic vehicle for secret messages about her personal life. From her lyrical references, they learn about Vonnegut, du Maurier, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Bolter from The Tortured Poets Department (2024) bears striking resonance with novelist Nancy Mitford’s life, Amy March from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Swift’s own romantic flightiness. Swift may not have the prestige of Nabokov, but she joins him by connecting her lyrical universe to the wider canon. If the rest of the literary establishment wants some of this action, they are welcome to write themselves into it. In fact, that’s what Invisible Strings invites them to do.
The Taylor Swift phenomenon follows the earlier Marvel phenomenon in leading dedicated fan culture into the mainstream. Perhaps the historians of the future will look back on this as an explosion of intellectual culture: fanfiction; fan art; four Swift “superfans” have already been hired as advisors to the V&A. But these modes of production are limited: fan art must flatter, fanfiction has always worked on appeals to predefined tropes general to the entire fanfiction cottage industry.
But poems escape these narrow confines. They are not obligatorily bound by form, narrative or iconicity: conventions of story and character only stand in the way when you want them to. The most memorable works in verse often function on several competing levels. Those complaining about Swift’s tendencies – to weave her world into the culture; inviting fans to speculate on her private life and its echoes in literature – are perfectly entitled to lay their own cryptic traps in response. The looseness of verse allows for a proliferation of dissident acrostics and anagrams – the poet can look Swift in the eye and match her penchant for secret code. In embracing this abstract form, the editor of Invisible Strings unwittingly draws us into a freer, less polarised version of mainstream culture. Here we move in real time from mass-consumption to call-and-response. This anthology is a development on Swift’s original mission.
For millions of young women, Swift’s lyrics have already become part of a canon. Now, a struggling artist can turn the same body of work (her eleven studio albums) from corporate product to textual touchstone – fair game for artistic elaboration and parody. We find the best precedent for this in ancient Rome. Virgil stole Homer’s epic form and system of epithets to exalt the contemporary emperor Caesar Augustus, but Ovid drew on the same body of work to vent about the ruler, who had sent him in exile to a faraway colony (here a tradition forms: a bit of Augustan propaganda by Roman poet Horace was later reused by Courtney Love to mourn Kurt Cobain).
Swift’s detractors are loud and dismissive. In fact, Swift’s own cliche – haters gonna hate – captures their essence. They’ll probably keep hating – but now, instead of hiding on the internet, they’ll be able to do it on her level, with institutional approval and in active conversation with the fans they have learnt to loathe. Everyone will be better off for it.
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