Old Romantics

folklore and evermore revisit the Lake District of first-generation Romantic English authors William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Swift is also influenced by American Romanticism, in particular its most original poet, Emily Dickinson. Swift's indebtedness to these two strands of lyric poetry, two versions of Romanticism, come together in the final two songs from evermore, both of which address the presence of the literary past through the activity of letter writing.

Swift's immersion in English culture is deeper and more sure-footed now than it was in the Anglophilic "London Boy," from Lover — as if she found it easier to connect to Englishness via the 1790s than the 2010s. The "prologue" to folklore reads like a modern updating of Wordsworth's "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads. Swift's summary — "Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend"1 — might equally apply to Wordsworth and Coleridge's collection. Her confident use of swearing recalls Wordsworth's defense of "ordinary" language.

In "invisible string," she recalls getting "lunch down by the Lakes."2 The song's theme, "Time / Curious time,"3 was Wordsworth's lifelong preoccupation too. The speaker's address to an unnamed "you" is made in present day Nashville — there is a "yogurt shop" and a "dive bar" among the references to blues and greens and "purple pink skies"4 — but her belief in fate is phrased in words reminiscent of Wordsworth's address to his sister Dorothy at the conclusion to "Tintern Abbey." "Green [is] the color of the grass" that begins Swift's song and creates "some / Invisible string / Tying you to me." Wordsworth also focuses on "this green pastoral landscape" that is dear to him both for itself and because Dorothy was with him to see and remember it.5 Pastel and by implication pastoral colors are for both writers a portal to an immortal present where time is briefly tricked to spin backwards rather than forwards.

In folklore's last song, "the lakes," Swift openly declares her homage to Wordsworth with her punning reference: "I've come too far to watch some name dropping sleaze / tell me what are my Wordsworth."6 Pursued by contemporary "hunters with cell phones," the speaker looks forward to bathing in "cliffside pools" with "no one around to tweet it." She has come to the right place to find language for "calamitous love and insurmountable grief."7

In evermore, Swift picks up the Romantic thread a generation later, moving the love story across the Atlantic. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Swift described folklore's cover as "this girl sleepwalking through the forest in a nightgown in 1830."8 There's been much discussion online about whether this girl might be Emily Dickinson who was born in 1830. Swift announced evermore's release on December 10, Dickinson's birthday. The album title also appears to reference one of Dickinson's most famous poems, "One Sister Have I in our House," the last line of which is "forevermore," which sounds almost like the two album titles combined.9

Fan conspiracies aside, Dickinson's influence on the album appears less to do with biography or shared word-play and more with her ideas about letters. In an 1868 letter about letter writing, Dickinson wrote: "A letter always feels to me like Immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone."10 Dickinson's celebration of the cerebral over the corporeal is unusual. Many epistolary theorists and certainly most epistolary writers argue the opposite, that the body of a letter stands in for the body of the person writing it. For this reason, reading a letter is often represented as the next best thing to being with a person. In replying, we often begin by commenting how happy we are to have "heard" from somebody, as if we have listened to their voice. Dickinson's letter writing is more akin to a conversation with God or Posterity. In addressing a letter to "you," she is writing to us from the beyond. A friend might be the first recipient of her thoughts, but not the first nor final reader.

The penultimate song on the album, "closure," centers on a letter. The speaker comments on a letter they have received from an old friend or lover, regretting "the way it had gone down" and offering "closure."11 Refusing to reply, the speaker instead cites words from the offending letter selectively and mockingly, denying the writer "closure" in return. The song has something in common with Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," a poem first written as a letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law, with whom he was in love but would never marry. Instead of directly imitating Coleridge's poem with its bitter and self-indulgent expression of despair — "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear" — it is as if Swift is imagining what it would be like to be Sara having received such a letter.12 What would she write back?

The last line of "Dejection: An Ode," is as follows: "Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, / Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice."13 Another source?

The last song on the album, "evermore," is also about letter writing. The song is addressed to somebody — who, as Bon Iver, eventually sings back — but the letters inside the song are not. Retracing her footsteps, "trying to find the one where I went wrong," the speaker writes letters "addressed to the fire," addressed in other words to nobody.14 This appears more akin to Dickinson's idea of the letter as "like Immortality." If you represent pain within a letter, the pain exists in another form, but it stays there, waiting to be re-activated when read. This is what happens to the speaker's sense of being "unmoored." By placing a feeling in a letter, it has nowhere to go, nowhere (in the imagery of the second half of the song) to float away to. Though she hopes that "This pain wouldn't be for / Evermore," the echo that follows it, "Evermore," suggests otherwise.15

If folklore is guided by Wordsworth's spirit, evermore is haunted by the attitude and words of his friend Coleridge and their American heir, Dickinson.

When Swift sings of "a 90s trend" on evermore's opening song, "willow," critics assumed she was talking about the 1990s.16 I think she is also daydreaming about the 1790s.

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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.

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