Is Taylor Swift a great poet?

In early 2024, a cross-curricular academic “Swiftposium” held in Melbourne, Australia, saw 400 abstracts submitted. In the same year, a Harvard course on Swift made international news. Its convener, the Harvard English professor, poet and critic Stephanie Burt, remembers 200 students turning up – and, soon after, camera crews. Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift is the book of that course, an album-by-album close reading of Swift’s output that reaches across literature, pop history, musicology and queer theory to examine the themes and appeal of arguably the most successful musician in history.

Certainly, Swift is the first pop star billionaire to reach that milestone without a makeup line or branded booze. Swift’s Eras tour added an estimated $5bn to the US economy in 2023 alone. If Swift counts as an economic sector in herself, it should be little surprise that her fame has spawned industrial quantities of commentary. Critics have opined; Swifties have produced an inestimable amount of online exegesis. Academics see no reason not to join the fray.

Whether Swift’s success is a victory for women’s art, for bloody-minded fortitude and industry nous, or the result of market-flooding productivity and fan-fleecing ticket prices, and the cause of a sizable carbon footprint (all those multiple versions of vinyl albums, all that jet fuel, all those plastic friendship bracelet beads) is very much up for healthy debate. Burt touches on a number of these concerns. “If you’re looking for an artist devoted to overturning the entire world system of capitalism … Taylor’s not your girl,” she writes. But Burt’s primary focus remains the work itself.

There remain those – high-culture fossils, rockist recidivists – who scoff at this level of academic interest in a successful female pop artist, despite multiple shipping containers’ worth of books on the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Even so, the words “poetic and musical genius” in Burt’s title are a touch of giddy boosterism that seems to play into the hands of those fossils and rockists (or maybe trolls them, just a little). She takes it as a given that the requisite exceptional threshold is reached; Swift’s work rewards sustained literary attention, its overarching themes navigating with great brio, wit and technical skill between “the Scylla of absolute independence… and the Charybdis of depending totally, guilelessly, on romantic love”.

But the very idea of “genius” is in Burt’s crosshairs too, based as it is on (overwhelmingly male) notions of tortured Romantic poets or modernist disruptors who destroy and remake, who place themselves above or apart from their audiences. That concept devalues the craft, the fan cultivation and the hard work of art – Swift’s specialist subjects.

This is not a cultural studies book; there is little on the intertextuality of Swift’s work, and you won’t find any Pierre Bourdieu-type discussions of the cultural capital flexed by her fans. Sometimes, individual chapters can feel rather nerdy or meandering, especially when Burt is writing about a Taylor album that you may not particularly care for. And her insistence on repeatedly circling back to her central thesis – how Swift remains both aspirational and relatable – feels unnecessary.

But like Swift, Burt repays close attention. The rigour of her intellectual inquiry is delivered in a generous, open style. Her frame of reference is wide and deep: she quotes the American poet and critic Maggie Nelson; she drags in the Greeks. You’re never far from a tortured poet: Keats and Yeats are on her side. One passage comparing the satirical poems of Alexander Pope (specifically, 1735’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot) to Swift’s pugilistic 2017 album Reputation is particularly frisson-inducing. This chapter is especially rich, not just because it quotes The Observer’s pop critic (hi!) teeth-gnashing about the record’s genre, but because Burt grapples nimbly with Swift’s whiteness, and Reputation’s engagement with R&B and hip-hop, and the minefield of coding anything “white” or “Black”.

If the academic elevation of Swift can still elicit sneers, it’s a reaction that often greets the work of prolific female artists more generally: all these words, so personal, so female; too much! That’s one of the thrusts of Maggie Nelson’s own essay-length book, The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift. Nelson compares Swift to Sylvia Plath not because Swift’s output is notably in thrall to that author’s work – it’s Lana Del Rey who is the self-described “24/7 Sylvia Plath” – but rather because of Plath’s desire for fame, her ambition to be widely published in magazines (“the slicks”) not just in poetry circles, and her autobiographical writing.

Crucially, the haters hate them both for the same reason. Plath and Swift are, as the jacket blurb for Nelson’s book puts it, “twinned targets of patriarchy’s ancient urge to disparage, trivialise and demonise such prolific, intimate output”. Since antiquity, female loquaciousness and female excess, she argues, have been seen to require damming and damning. Swift attracts all the predictable accusations of faux-vulnerability, of needing an editor, of excessive self-indulgence. (Negative reactions to Lily Allen’s West End Girl followed the same pattern – all that pearl-clutching about oversharing. Think of the children!) These two books are a needed corrective to this desire for “putting a door on the female mouth”, as Nelson quotes the poet Anne Carson. Now let’s have the same – all the courses, the symposia, the scholarship – about Beyoncé.

Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift by Stephanie Burt (Basic Books, £22) and The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift by Maggie Nelson (Fern Press, £9.99) are available from The Observer Shop with a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply

Editor’s note: our recommendations are chosen independently by our journalists. The Observer may earn a small commission if a reader clicks a link and purchases a recommended product. This revenue helps support Observer journalism

Photograph Kevin Mazur/TAS24/Getty Images