‘Where all the poets went to die’: Romanticising the Romantics in Taylor Swift’s ‘the lakes’

Welcome to the first episode of 2025! We’re kicking off the year with a deep-dive into ‘the lakes’, the bonus track on Taylor Swift’s 2020 Grammy-award winning album folklore. Some may wonder how two people can spend over an hour talking about a single 3.5 minute long track, and to that we say: are you even surprised anymore?

Let us first point out that we are huge fans of Taylor Swift’s songwriting. She is a talented lyricist with a serious knack for catchy melodies and no one can say her bridges aren’t genius. folklore is also both of our favourite album by her. So when we heard ‘the lakes’, we were confused. How did that same artist write a song that not only feels completely overwritten, literal, and clunky lyrically, but is also actually factually incorrect?

Part fact-check, part critique, join us as we try and untangle the intentions behind the lyricism of ‘the lakes’, deep-dive into the actual literary and historical context of Romantic poetry, and attempt to answer the question: does Taylor Swift actually know what Romanticism is? Fellow English literature graduates, get your Norton Anthologies out, we’re doing some close reading.

Music by Max Elliott

BIbliography

• Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. London, Penguin, 2004.

• Daugherty, Kristie Frederick ed. Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift. Penguin Random House, 2024.

• Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions. Directed by Taylor Swift, Disney+, 25 Nov. 2020.

• Swift, Taylor. folklore. Republic, 2020.

• Swift, Taylor. ‘I Hate It Here.’ The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. Republic, 2024.

• Swift, Taylor. ‘the lakes.’ folklore (deluxe version). Republic, 2020.

• Swift, Taylor. ‘The Tortured Poets Department.’ The Tortured Poets Department. Republic, 2024.

• Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.