Taylor Swift's English Teacher Scam

How Taylor Swift turned from a brilliant lyricist into a parody of an English professor

I am pop culture illiterate.

To give you an idea of just how little I know about contemporary pop music, I had never heard of “Bad Bunny” until this past summer, when a friend of mine showed me her favorite “Bad Bunny” song and proceeded to spend over an hour laughing about how I had never heard of this particular singer with a rabbit fetish. To this day, I cannot name a single song by this bunny character (why is he bad?) and prefer to be transported to previous centuries with my listening choices.

Nevertheless, one pop artist has always been on my radar, and that is Taylor Swift.

Back in middle and early high school, I used to love Taylor Swift more than anything in the world. Those were the days when the pop star still passed herself off as a “country singer” and had just barely entered her twenties. She sang about boys and heartbreak and, unlike many of her 2010s female pop star compatriots, did not show up half-naked on stage. Say what you will about Swift’s singing—and I don’t think she has ever been a particularly great vocalist—but she is undeniably a good songwriter whose layered lyrics stand out from the repetitive choruses and one-line bangers from her peers. For her third studio album, Speak Now, in fact, Swift wrote every single song lyric on her own—a feat virtually unheard of in today’s music industry, where few pop artists possess the writerly talent to pen lyrics without the help of an outside party.

So I reject the notion that Taylor Swift is fundamentally talentless. She is certainly overhyped as a vocalist and has the vocal range of a sick toad, but Swift did not rise to fame for the reasons that Beyoncé, Adele, or Lady Gaga—singers known for their stellar range and belting abilities—have garnered their fan bases, for instance. Taylor Swift is beloved by millions of people because, for a pop star at least, she is a damn good lyricist.

Take the extended lyrics of 2012’s “All Too Well”:

And I was never good at telling jokes, but the punchline goes
I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age
From when your Brooklyn broke my skin and bones
I’m a soldier who’s returning half her weight

For a pop song about a breakup, these lines are stunningly complex. Compare Swift’s songwriting skills to those of Adele in “Rolling in the Deep,” a contemporary pop song about a similar subject:

We could’ve had it all
Rolling in the deep
You had my heart inside of your hand
And you played it to the beat

Make no mistake—“Rolling in the Deep” is a great song that brings me back to my early high school days. But Swift easily outshines her peers when it comes to songwriting. Her lyrics are, indeed, poetic and even use complex literary devices—synecdoche in her description of her lover’s “Brooklyn,” and metaphor as she casts herself as a run-down soldier.

Even at the age of 20, Swift wrote lyrics that demonstrated literary maturity—such as in 2010’s “Speak Now”:

Fond gestures are exchanged
And the organ starts to play
A song that sounds like a death march
And I am hiding in the curtains
It seems that I was uninvited by your lovely bride-to-be

Swift is more than aware of these talents herself—perhaps a bit too aware. In a 2016 interview for Vogue, she emphatically declares that if she were to teach a subject in school, it would be English. Writing for ELLE several years later, she peppers her musings about songwriting with literary references, citing F. Scott Fitzgerald as an inspiration and asserting her love for Shakespeare. It was arguably literary references themselves that made her famous—her chart-topping 2008 song “Love Story” alludes not only to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but also to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter:

‘Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter
And my daddy said, “Stay away from Juliet”
But you were everything to me
I was beggin’ you, “Please don’t go, “ and I said

Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone
I’ll be waiting, all there’s left to do is run
You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess
It’s a love story, baby, just say, “Yes”

Perhaps it was these very literary references—on top of my standard boy troubles and teenage angst—that drew me to Swift in the first place. As an aspiring writer and classic book nerd, I appreciated Swift’s pull towards literature and loved to rock out to her quasi-poetic lyrics.

But at the age of 12, I had read neither Romeo and Juliet nor The Scarlet Letter. I didn’t really understand just how far afield Swift strayed with her allusions to my would-be favorite dramatist Shakespeare. In fact, expecting a happy love story between two star-crossed lovers, I couldn’t wait to read Romeo and Juliet in the 10th grade.

After reading the actual play, of course, I could not have been more disappointed. Romeo and Juliet wasn’t about two lovers who defied all odds and ended up happy together. Shakespeare didn’t write a story about a princess in a princess dress running to get married to her beloved Romeo. He wrote about two stupid kids who played stupid games and won stupid prizes—in this case death. Swift had deceived me! Had she even read the play? Like twelve-year-old me, she assumed that Romeo and Juliet was a happy love story about overcoming parental disapproval. But she had gotten it all wrong! The play wasn’t about that at all!

Calming myself down, I told myself that it wasn’t all that serious—pop culture got literature wrong all the time, and it was just a song. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with Shakespeare’s play at all. But I had idolized Taylor Swift, and she had certainly misled me about the play. Having listened to “Love Story” hundreds of times since the age of twelve, I came into 10th grade English expecting a completely different reading experience than the one that Shakespeare and my draconian English teacher ended up giving me. I was disillusioned by Taylor Swift, but I told myself that it was only one song—she couldn’t possibly come out with another song that leaned so heavily on literature while getting virtually everything wrong.

I was nearly as wrong about Swift as Swift was about literature.

Realizing just how much she had capitalized on shaky Shakespeare references, Swift proceeded to make literature virtually inseparable from her musical identity.

Featuring rabbit holes and Cheshire cat smiles, 1989’s “Wonderland” was an homage to Lewis Carroll; Reputation’s “Getaway Car” opened with a play on Dickens’ most famous opening line (“It was the best of times/the worst of crimes”); and folklore’s “the lakes” was an explicit nod to the Lake Poets. Soon, both TikTok videos and peer-reviewed essays teemed with literary criticism of Taylor Swift’s songs, with several professors arguing that we should study Swift alongside Shakespeare and with Harvard—among other prestigious universities such as Stanford and NYU—going so far as to implement a full-semester course on Taylor Swift in their English department.

You might see why, at a certain point, I started to get annoyed.

Listen, I give credit where credit is due. I have already said that Swift is an accomplished lyricist and that she is perhaps the best songwriter of our time who has also attained widespread cultural popularity. That said, Swift is no literary genius, nor should she be treated as one. I have already written about how it is inappropriate to replace Shakespeare with Swift, so I am not here today to go after university professors who would grant Swift the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Instead, my present beef with Swift is that her literary identity is and always has been performative—she imbues many of her songs with literary allusions to attain an unwarranted aura of sophistication while failing to understand the first thing about the great works of literature she references.

I don’t even believe that Swift should step away from referencing literature entirely—like my favorite poet T.S. Eliot, I am more partial to allusion than perhaps any other literary device out there. But what irritates me about Swift is that she has successfully convinced the majority of the public—most of whom do not know the first thing about literature—that she is some sort of literary genius English teacher—an idea she made explicit both in 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and in her recent engagement post. And while I held out some hope that The Tortured Poets Department might actually do justice to the supposedly tortured poets it references, the album contains nothing more than throwaway references to poets such as Dylan Thomas that have absolutely no relation to the works of the poets in question.

The most obvious poetic allusion on the album lies in the track “The Albatross,” a clear reference to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Swift’s lyrics, however, just like those of “Love Story,” have nothing to do with Coleridge’s albatross—even metaphorically. She paints the albatross as a femme fatale, a “woman here to destroy you.” In Swift’s song, the image of the albatross stands for nothing more than bitterness, when, in reality, the albatross is meant to embody the crushing weight of one’s own sin. Coleridge’s albatross is an innocent creature shot down mercilessly by an indifferent mariner who later must pay the price for his misdeeds. Swift, on the other hand, creates nothing more than an outline of a vengeful seductress, using a complex literary reference to make a point that bears no relation to the metaphor’s original intention.

You would think that the mixed reviews of The Tortured Poets Department, perhaps the worst album that Swift has ever released, would have taught her a lesson about roleplaying a freshman year English professor, but yesterday, however, Swift struck again with more misapplied literary allusions in The Life of a Showgirl. The moment I opened up the album and saw a song called “The Fate of Ophelia” as its opening track, I knew that an essay of this sort was in order.

I present to you the lyrics of “The Fate of Ophelia”:

All that time
I sat alone in my tower
You were just honing your powers
Now I can see it all
Late one night
You dug me out of my grave and
Saved my heart from the fate of
Ophelia

Okay. I get it. The “fate of Ophelia” is that she commits suicide, so Swift is reflecting on how a man (presumably her fiancé Travis Kelce) rescued her from the same fate. Beyond that parallel, I fail to see what this song has to do with Hamlet at all (at what point, for instance, does Shakespeare ever put Ophelia in a tower?). Compare these lyrics to the lyrics of some of her older songs—such as the beautifully written “All Too Well”—and Swift seems to have lost her songwriting prowess entirely. One Substacker has already called the album “laughably bad,” while several others have commented on absurdity of the following lyrics from “Wood,” which I shall refrain from belittling further:

Redwood tree
It ain’t hard to see
His love was the key
That opened my thighs

My frustration with and disappointment in Taylor Swift does not stem from hatred. I have paid money to see her sing live not once but twice in my life. In high school, I owned Taylor Swift–branded notebooks and countless Taylor Swift tour tees. I would go so far as to say that Swift’s lyrics probably inspired many of the poems I wrote in my tumultuous teenage years. Swift got me through every single high school crush and those inescapable sleepless nights when I felt misunderstood. In fact, I hold Swift to a high standard because before she was wildly famous, she was capable of so much more than she is now. Her best lyrics and most accomplished songwriting happens when she doesn’t try to pack her lines with literary references but when she writes from experience such as in “All Too Well.” But the moment she started to think of herself as an English teacher, she lost her touch. She began overplaying references that she doesn’t quite understand, attempting to merge literary acuity with breakup tunes. Quite tellingly, her music suffered as a result. Compared to many of the distinct tracks on her early albums, the songs on The Life of a Showgirl all sound the same.

Swift might have lost me as a fan simply because I outgrew the age where my biggest problem was the latest boy who broke my heart, but I think that my disillusionment—and that of so many other former Swifties—cuts deeper than that. Simply put, Swift shines in her most authentic and genuine moments, and in taking on the persona of an English teacher, Swift has insisted on becoming someone she is not. Swift is a singer, a songwriter, and a billionaire pop star. She is not a teacher of literature, nor will she ever be. In overpacking her songs with literary references, Swift has lost her touch as a genius lyricist, and that is a shame, for many young girls who listen to her religiously might have had their own poetic sensibilities awakened through Swift’s more complex lyrics. Instead, Swift now resorts to simplistic lines dressed up in literary garb—when they do not outright border on vulgarity.

Swift’s fate might be the fate of any young talented musician flung into fame and money, but she remained genuine even amidst widespread popularity until about three or four years ago, when the quality of her music started to drastically decline. We can only speculate whether that change had anything to do with her doubling down on the English teacher aesthetic, but either way, it is clear that her incessant literary references are doing more harm than good for the quality of her music.

Swift shines when she is Swift—not when she is a professor. If she wishes to remain relevant, perhaps she should ditch the English major act and lean into what she has always done best—writing lyrics from the heart.

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