Taylor Swift: A New Poet on the Rise

Kenneth R. Jenkins

The Tortured Poets Department the 11th release by artist Taylor Swift has been released and the buzz of this new release puts me in the mind of those poets who write with their whole body and soul.

Poets/songwriters like Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan, Alicia Keys, Jill Scott and many others before Swift bear their heart and soul by the strike of the pen writing meaningful words to mean something or just relate to others.

I only heard a few songs and by judging from what I heard, it does sound like Taylor locked herself in a room and just wrote each song lyrics like turning the time back the memories of her mind and like a person writing a diary spilling their soul one line, one page at a time.

She has the heart and soul of a poet alright. I read somewhere that Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut). Now you see, that poetry is in her blood and making Swift an unofficial poet laureate for the next generation, the new soundtrack for a generation.

Kenneth R. Jenkins freelance writer, poet, minister, devoted husband living in Savannah, Georgia.