{I} f you have been living under a rock — or if you are a rock — you might not have heard that Taylor Swift was just named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. I am coolly pleased by this outcome — not only for having predicted it, but because she beat out boy-next-door dictators Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin for the honor. (Long live the West!)

Swift’s Time profile, masterfully crafted by Sam Lansky (West Coast editor of Time and ghostwriter of Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me), generated plenty of internet fodder. Perhaps no other excerpt from the piece has received more laud or scorn than the following: “As a pop star, [Swift] sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell.”

As Joni Mitchell is incomparable in all things, and Paul McCartney is a living shaper of history, (and Bob Dylan is . . . a Nobel laureate, I guess), many have recoiled at Taylor Swift’s categorization alongside such literary icons. I would like to change their minds. Taylor Swift is not only a philosopher, she is also a poet.

Swift is a poet of the old world, knight-errant, dolce stil nuovo variety. Love is her subject, but not Love in the abstract. Her own, messy, real run-ins with Love feed her work. Her meditations on romance are average insofar as all shared, timeless things are average — her prosimetrum encapsulates the universal experience of lovers across the ages. Swift, by capturing her own feelings in story and rhyme, captures the feelings of young lovers (hundreds of millions of them, in fact) everywhere.

While one may criticize the “ME!” focus of her music, she is by no means the first artist to use her own romantic foibles as a launching point for poetic output. This is particularly evident in comparing her work to that of two humanist authors and love poets of Renaissance Italy, Petrarch and Dante.

Francesco Petrarca was a 14th-century author who famously wrote love sonnets in his own Italian dialect instead of Latin (which was the traditional language for any work of scholarship or high art at the time). Petrarch is lauded as a father of humanism — he revered the faculties of the human person and gloried in the human experience. Swift’s work follows in the same vein.

Take the opening stanzas of Petrarch’s “S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?” (“What Do I Feel If This Is Not Love?”):

What do I feel if this is not love?
But if it is love, God, what thing is this?
If good, why this effect: bitter, mortal?
If bad, then why is every suffering sweet?

If I desire to burn, why the tears and grief?
If my state is evil, what’s the use of grieving?
O living death, O delightful evil,
how can you be in me so, if I do not consent?

Compare this to Swift’s “I Did Something Bad” (2017):

They say I did something bad

But why’s it feel so good?
Most fun I ever had
And I’d do it over and over and over again if I could
It just felt so good. . . .

I can feel the flames on my skin
He says, “Don’t throw away a good thing”
But if he drops my name, then I owe him nothin’
And if he spends my change, then he had it comin’

Clearly, Swift’s lyrics subvert Petrarch’s understanding of love as pain passively experienced. Swift asserts that she is the agent of the “suffering sweet” of her romantic entanglements.

For further evidence of Swift’s reprising the Western tradition, look to an excerpt from Petrarch’s “Come talora al caldo tempo sòle” (“As At Times in Hot Sunny Weather”):

As at times in hot sunny weather . . .
I am always running towards the sunlight of her eyes,
fatal to me, from which so much sweetness comes
that Love takes no heed of the reins of reason:
and he who discerns them is conquered by his desire.

And truly I see how much disdain they have for me,
and I know I am certain to die of them,
since my strength cannot counter the pain:

And compare this to stanzas from Swift’s major hit “Cruel Summer” (2019):

So cut the headlights, summer’s a knife
I’m always waiting for you just to cut to the bone
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
And if I bleed, you’ll be the last to know

Oh, it’s new, the shape of your body
It’s blue, the feeling I’ve got
And it’s ooh, whoa, oh
It’s a cruel summer

Again, the evidence of Swift’s reappropriation of the Petrarchan tradition is staggering. She must have Petrarch on her bedside table. If I have not yet convinced you that Swift is a scholar and a poetess of the people, bear with me. Let us conjure the foil of Dante Alighieri.

Dante, another 14th-century poet renowned for writing in the common tongue of his hometown, is best known for authoring the Divine Comedy, a must-have text on any Great Books shelf worthy of the name. Dante is less known for penning the Vita Nuova (The New Life), which is very much a “ME!”-focused work. Throughout the text, Dante meditates on, anguishes over, and lyricizes his love for a girl he has only glimpsed a few times in the town square, named Beatrice. Beatrice herself is not the subject, but his own heightened experiences of Love conveyed through her remain the focal point:

And when you’re near, Love tells me what to do;
he says, “If perishing disturbs you, flee!”
My face displays the color of my heart,
which, swooning deathlike, props itself nearby;
and through the drunkenness my shakes impart,
it seems the rocks shout raucously: “Die! Die!”

Dante’s experiences tightly map onto Swift’s as she records in her song “Don’t Blame Me” (2017):

Something happened for the first time, in
The darkest little paradise
Shakin, pacin’, I just need you

For you, I would cross the line
I would waste my time
I would lose my mind. . . .

Lord, save me, my drug is my baby
I’ll be usin’ for the rest of my life

The parallels continue. When Dante speaks of meeting Beatrice for the first time, he describes it as follows:

It was exactly the ninth hour of that day when her intoxicatingly lovely greeting came to me. And since it was the first time her words had reached my ears, I felt such bliss that I withdrew from people as if I were drunk, away to the solitude of my room, and settled down to think about this most graceful of women. . . . Clearly then my bliss depended on her salutation; it was a bliss that many times surpassed and overflowed my capacity to contain it.

This passage closely mirrors a song of Swift’s, “Enchanted” (2010), which recounts her first meeting with someone whom she found to be “intoxicatingly lovely”:

this night is flawless, don’t you let it go
I’m wonderstruck, dancing around all alone
I’ll spend forever wondering if you knew
I was enchanted to meet you

This is me praying that
This was the very first page
Not where the story line ends
My thoughts will echo your name, until I see you again

The similarities are self-evident.

Through fresh forms and old themes, Swift has inherited and made new the amorous poetic tradition of the West. Now if only Swifties could be convinced to read up on the Western canon . . .

Disclaimer: The opinions in this piece are entirely the author’s. The author is not receiving external compensation in the form of Swiftcoin. Any similarities between this piece and the calculated messaging of Taylor Swift’s brilliant and bloodless public-relations team are purely coincidental. If this piece in any way inspires an undergraduate course on Taylor Swift, please invite the author to give a guest lecture.