If life is just a classroom, Taylor Swift has been lecturing on love, loss and ambition for nearly 20 years through 12 eras of songs. And a new book released Oct. 7 hands out the college course curriculum.
Author Stephanie Burt went viral in 2024 for teaching a Harvard class on the Eras Tour singer. The course, officially titled “Taylor Swift and Her World,” was packed to capacity with hundreds of undergraduates.
“I thought I’d be teaching a seminar, with a dozen-odd Harvard Swifties around a big table,” she said. “Instead we got 200 students, almost a dozen teaching assistants and a lecture hall with a baby grand piano, followed by international media attention.”
Soon after, Basic Books — which had previously published Burt’s “Don’t Read Poetry” — offered her a contract to turn lectures into chapters. In June 2024, Burt began writing. She finished the manuscript seven months later.
“Taylor Swift is a world phenomenon. How did she get that way?” Burt writes in “Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.” She answers that Swift has always been “relatable (as listeners we feel we are like her) and aspirational (we want to imagine we are more like her).”
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The thesis: Swift as genius
The book moves era by era through Swift’s discography, from the singer’s debut country album to “The Tortured Poets Department.” Burt does not treat Swift as just a pop star but as a poet and cultural force whose lyrics illuminate the universe.
“An almost too typical teenage girl, an insecure outsider even when she gets celebrated and welcomed, a beauty icon who knows she tries too much, Swift represents the kind of person that many of us want to be and mirrors the way that some of us already see ourselves,” Burt writes.
Later, she argues, “A versatile creator who understands her audiences; who brings us along with her; who figures out all the rules, then uses those rules to make an art that’s many-layered, emotionally compelling, individual, and new: That kind of creator deserves the term ‘genius’ too. And that’s the kind that Taylor Swift has become.”
To be transparent, this reporter is mentioned briefly for giving Burt a tour of Nashville, including Centennial Park, during her research. The position of Taylor Swift reporter is also a unique testament to the superstar’s impact.
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A constant moving target
Yet the problem with writing about the 35-year-old singer is she never stands still. Even as the Harvard professor finalized her chapters on the impact of the blockbuster Eras Tour, Swift announced her 12th era, “The Life of a Showgirl.”
“It is wild,” Burt said. “But it’s also just what Taylor does. Writing the book made me feel even closer to Taylor, not in a creepy way, I hope, because she writes songs about her own productivity, about her own need to just keep on working. ‘I’m a work person,’ as she has said. And I, too, don’t want to disappoint anyone.”
Swift moving faster than publishing timelines could leave an author flummoxed. But Burt insists this is not a biography, rather a critical appreciation. The literary expert wrote wherever she could: at home, in libraries, at airports and in coffee shops.
“Anywhere, really, as long as I had half an hour or more to turn my notes into prose,” she said.
Harvard professor Stephanie Burt is publishing a book in the fall on Taylor Swift, “Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift.”
A link to buy “Taylor’s Version: The poetic and musical genius of Taylor Swift.”
To give a taste of the 300 pages, here is a passage that any Swifite could appreciate and any outsider could relate to:
“People will think Taylor does everything with intention even if she’s in a lavender haze; people will look at dried bloodstains that turn maroon and think they’re part of her color scheme; people will look at her scars and see fashion statements. People want Taylor to exercise control over everything, and then they resent her for doing it. Taylor herself — who turned thirty in 2019 — grew up trying to control everything, to please everyone, to depend on their approval, and now she has it: Can she keep it? Now what? She’s better at planning and scheming and masterminding than anybody else whose art we consume — and yet she’s at least as much of a mess as the rest of us.”
In other words: genius, yes… but still human.
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Harvard professor pens book on Taylor Swift’s genius: ‘Taylor’s Version’