Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
Taylor Swift has a reputation for many things. Dropping surprise albums is not one of them, at least not before this year.
If folklore is inspired by William Wordsworth, evermore seems inspired by Emily Dickinson.
On folklore tears ricochet, on evermore there's dull pain without outward sign.
If folklore is a summer romance, evermore is a Christmas reunion at home.
If folklore is summer, evermore is winter.
As Stephanie Burt and Julia Harris point out, "everything's a return to something" on this album, "a rewrite, a re-take, a retraction, a chance to remember and do it again." In stepping back, to childhood, to high school, to country music, to the countryside, to daydreams of celebrity, and to daydreams of being unknown, Swift revisits and updates her own back catalog as material for songwriting.
She revises herself, or almost does.
What did Elizabeth Bishop say in her elegy for Robert Lowell? "Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise."1
Jonathan Ellis (@JonathanSEllis) is Reader in American Literature at the University of Sheffield. His non-fiction essays have appeared in The Letters Page, The Tangerine and The Manchester Review.
References
- Elizabeth Bishop, "North Haven," Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 210.[⤒]
