By Stuart Mitchner

The adolescence of a whole American generation was mediated by Dylan’s songs…

—Helen Vendler (1933-2024)

The last week of National Poetry Month began on Tuesday, April 23, William Shakespeare’s 460th birthday. Right now a whole generation of listeners is being “mediated” by Taylor Swift, whose latest album The Tortured Poets Department opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, “with historic numbers,” according to the New York Times. It’s hard to ignore an album with that title in a month celebrating poetry, not to mention the fact that Swift’s work is the subject of courses being taught at major universities, including Harvard, which offers an English Department class called “Taylor Swift and Her World.”

Romeo and Juliet

From what I’ve heard of The Tortured Poets Department, there are no songs, so far, as infectious as “Wildest Dreams,” “Wonderland,” “This Love,” “Blank Space,” and “Style” on 1989 (Taylor’s Version). With Shakespeare’s month coming to a close, I’m viewing Swift’s songs in the company of poetry and music on the grand scale, such as La reine Mab, reine des songes (queen of dreams), Hector Berlioz’s orchestral translation of Mercutio’s virtuoso flight of fancy in Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet.

Invoked shortly before his death, Mercutio’s Queen Mab gallops night by night in her “empty hazel-nut chariot” through lovers’ brains, lawyers’ fingers, ladies’ lips, parsons’ noses, and sometimes “o’er a soldier’s neck, who then dreams of cutting foreign throats, of breaches, ambuscadoes,” and who “starts and wakes, and being thus frighted swears a prayer or two and sleeps again.” Mercutio is in mid-flight, punning on the hag “who learns maids first to bear, making then women of good carriage,” when Romeo interrupts: “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talk’st of nothing!”

Writing between 1591 and 1595, Shakespeare would have been in his late twenties when he conceived of a word-drunk youth who would die violently even while riffing on his fatal wound, “not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ‘tis enough, t’will serve.”

Berlioz experienced Mercutio’s “nothing” in 1827 while attending the play in Paris and falling in love with (and later marrying) the Irish actress playing Juliet. “I may add that at the time I did not know a word of English,” Berlioz admits in his memoir. “I could only glimpse Shakespeare darkly through the mists of Letourneur’s translation; the splendour of the poetry which gives a whole new glowing dimension to his glorious works was lost on me.” On that occasion, it was “the power of the acting, especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and voice and gesture” that “told me more and gave me a far richer awareness of the ideas and passions of the original.”

Swift’s Mercutio

“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” is Taylor Swift’s song about taming a 21st-century Mercutio whose jokes are “far too loud,” whose brain is racing with dopamine “on a six-lane Texas highway,” whose hand is “calloused from his pistol.” Like a poet at a slam, Swift begins hard and heavy: “The smoke cloud billows out of his mouth like a freight train through a small town.” After that she strides the line between conversational and musical (“I can handle me a dangerous man”) right up to the existential desperation of the last line, “Whoa, maybe I can’t.”

Reading Swift’s lyrics on the page, I looked at words as words, along with the verbal dynamics of the performance, and without reference to the social media gossip about who, where, and how that rouses a fascinated worldwide fan base. In her album’s title poem, Swift says “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re both modern Idiots.” Again, instead of pondering the real-life identity of whoever may have played Dylan Thomas to Swift’s Patti Smith, I’m just noting the fact that these are the only two poets she explicitly cites in The Tortured Poets Department. I’m also reminded of the line in Simon and Garfunkel’s song from 1966, “The Dangling Conversation”: “And you read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost / And we note our place with book markers that measure what we’ve lost.”

Shakespeare to Dylan

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom agrees with the Bard’s first editor Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) that Shakespeare himself played the part of the Ghost in Hamlet when it opened at the Globe in 1601. After observing that Shakespeare “was what we now call ‘a character actor,’ “ Bloom wonders “why did he play the ghost?” Could he have had some “personal investment” in it?

Having pictured Taylor Swift in the unlikely setting of a poetry slam, I imagined a similar situation around the Ghost as voiced by his actor-author in the great “slam” of the ages, appearing mysteriously, fantastically on the ramparts of Elsinore, the gateway to the drama as he raps out a tale “whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood” and “make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.” Now suppose that the Ghost’s closing command to Hamlet, to revenge “his foul and most unnatural murder,” is directed at the legions of deniers who through the centuries have “murdered” Shakespeare by spurning the idea that a human being bearing his name actually wrote the plays. Yes, it’s “Murder most foul!”

And four centuries later, in the year 2020, the Ghost’s call to action is “mediated” by Bob Dylan’s virtuoso epic on the undying mystery of the Kennedy assassination, “Murder Most Foul.”

Swift’s English Connection

The closest to an actual poem on Swift’s Tortured Poets Department may be “So Long, London,” with its echoes of the title more spoken than sung (“Stitches undone / Two graves one gun / I’ll find someone”). A song about London in Shakespeare’s month also brings to mind the English connection in Swift’s career, a possibility already in play since she shares the last name of the author of Gulliver’s Travels, whose viscerally scatalogical epistle “From a Physician To His Mistress” begins, “By poets we are well assured / That love, alas! can ne’er be cured.”

One reviewer of Swift’s video for her song “Cardigan,” from her acclaimed 2020 album folklore, compared her new look to “that of a classic English rose,” while her song “The Lakes” refers to Swift’s semi-retirement in England’s Lake District, also mentioned in “Invisible String,” in which she imagines a red rose “with no one around to tweet it” while referring to the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. As she puts it on Instagram when discussing the conception of folklore: “In isolation, my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory.”

Helen Vendler

When I first learned of Helen Vendler’s death, I didn’t notice that the author of The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard University Press 1997) died on April 23, 2024, Shakespeare’s 460th birthday, which is where I began, with reference to a course on Taylor Swift at Harvard, where Vendler taught for almost half a century.

While Vendler most likely never commented on the Taylor Swift phenomenon, my guess is that she’d have approached the subject much as she did in September 2017 when asked on juked.com to comment on Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize. After referring to the way “high” literature has always incorporated “folk” literature and the English and Scottish ballads that led to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, she said: “Bob Dylan descends from that line. The adolescence of a whole American generation was mediated by Dylan’s songs.” He is “a cultural phenomenon, a songwriter rather than a poet.”

As for Vendler herself, the New York Times obituary described her as a “Colossus of Poetry Criticism.” Roger Rosenblatt’s piece, also in the Times, brought her nicely down to earth: “Some critics gain notice by something new they discover in the literature they examine. Helen became the most important critic of the age by dealing with something old and basic — the fact that great poetry was, well, lovable. Her vast knowledge of it was not like anyone else’s, and she embraced the poets she admired with informed exuberance.”