20 Taylor Swift songs with literary references you’ll have missed

“The Lakes” pays tribute to William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets of the 18th century.

Swift references poetry all through “The Lakes,” particularly Romanticism, which was an 18th-century motion that valued emotional expression over logic and cause.

Romantic poets have been empathetic relatively than judgmental; instinctive relatively than self-conscious. They believed in embracing “the bliss of solitude,” writing as a approach of understanding one’s personal thoughts, and cultivating the correlation between pleasure and creativeness.

Certainly, one may argue that “Folklore” is a contemporary revival of Romanticism, and Swift herself appears to make that argument in “The Lakes.”

“Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?” Swift sings to open the music.

Within the second verse, she provides: “I’ve come too far to observe some namedropping sleaze / Inform me what are my phrases price.”

Along with praising the worth of her personal work, Swift attracts a semantic connection to William Wordsworth, who is named one of many founders of the Romantic motion.

Within the preface to his assortment “Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth famously wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of highly effective emotions: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

At age 29, Wordsworth relocated to the village of Grasmere within the county of Cumbria, situated within the coronary heart of England’s Lake District. He was impressed by the pure panorama and wrote lots of his best-known poems within the following years at Dove Cottage, which has now been enshrined as a museum.

Throughout this time, Wordsworth’s brother died in a shipwreck. The loss impressed him to write down three elegies: “I solely look’d for ache and grief,” “Distressful reward! this Guide receives,” and “To the Daisy.”

In response to Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, an professional in English literature and Romanticism, Wordsworth was “the primary poet to write down elegies that eulogized himself.”

Later within the music, Swift begs for “auroras and unhappy prose” whereas she frets and cries amidst the lakes and Windermere peaks.

Wordsworth made an analogous reference in a 1791 letter: “Such an tour would have served like an Aurora Borealis to gild your lengthy Lapland night time of melancholy.”

He additionally makes use of the imagery of a “Lapland night time” in a poem titled “To a Younger Woman, Who had been Reproached for Taking Lengthy Walks within the Nation.” 

Wordsworth addresses a girl who can really feel herself rising older, who’s impressed by isolation to replicate on the “heart-stirring days” in her life.

Wordsworth’s muse carefully resembles Swift in the course of the “Folklore” period. The pensive album, born throughout quarantine, was the primary she launched after turning 30 years previous.

Swift had beforehand expressed her concern of getting old as a feminine entertainer, describing the trade as an “elephant graveyard” filled with older girls: “As I am reaching 30, I need to work actually laborious whereas society remains to be tolerating me being profitable,” she stated in her Netflix documentary “Miss Americana.”

Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s poem gives an alternate imaginative and prescient of getting old as “serene and brilliant,” portray his muse as “a lightweight to younger and previous.” (Moreover, Wordsworth himself penned most of his greatest poems after turning 30).

“Thy ideas and emotions shall not die, / Nor go away thee, when gray hairs are nigh,” he writes.