Should Taylor Swift be taught alongside Shakespeare? A professor of literature says yes

By Liam E Semler, University of Sydney

Does Taylor Swift’s music belong in the English classroom? No, obviously. We should teach the classics, like Shakespeare’s Sonnets. After all, they have stood the test of time. It’s 2024 and he was born in 1564, and she’s only 34. What’s more, she is a pop singer, not a poet. Sliding her into the classroom would be yet another example of a dumbed-down curriculum. It’s ridiculous. It makes everyone look bad.

I’ve heard all that. And plenty more like it. But none of it is right. Well, the dates might be, but not the assumptions – about Shakespeare, about English, about teaching, and about Swift.

Swift is, by the way, a poet. She sees herself this way and her songs bear her out. In Sweet Nothing, on the Midnights album, she sings:

On the way home

I wrote a poem

You say “What a mind”

This happens all the time.

I’m sure it does. Swift is relentlessly productive as a songwriter. With Midnights, she picked up her fourth Grammy for Album of the Year. And here we are, on the brink of another studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, somehow written and produced amid the gargantuan success of Midnights and the Eras World Tour.

An ally of literature

Regardless of what The Tortured Poets Department ends up being about, Swift is already a firm ally of literature and reading. She is a donor of thousands of books to public libraries in the United States, an advocate to schoolchildren of the importance of reading and songwriting, and a lover of the process of crafting lyrics.

In a 2016 Vogue interview, Swift declared with glee that, if she were a teacher, she would teach English. The literary references in her songs are endlessly noted. “I love Shakespeare as much as the next girl,” she wrote in a 2019 article for Elle.

https://youtu.be/mdgKhdcQrNw?si=nYQatRCIj7ZmBMhj

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