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Graduate Dissertations and Theses

A "new literary history" of modern poetry: history and deconstruction in the works of whitman, stevens, and olson.

Paul A. Bové , Binghamton University--SUNY

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

Whitman, Walt, Stevens, Wallace, Olson, Charles, American poetry, History and criticism

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

English, General Literature, and Rhetoric

First Advisor

William V. Spanos

Second Advisor

Robert Kroetsch

Third Advisor

Gerald Gillespie

The literary history of Modern and Postmodern poetry needs to be rewritten because much of this poetry throws into doubt the very language which critics normally use to write such histories. Furthermore, Modern poetry provides a more adequate, because less rigid, sense of poetic “tradition” upon which authentic literary history must "rest." The "history" of Modern and Postmodern poetry is largely the work of New Critics and New Critically trained academicians. Although there have been recently some attempts to deal with Modern poetry from non-New Critical standpoints, they have not succeeded. Indeed, a deconstruction of the rhetoric of the New Critics and its antagonists—Harold Bloom, Walter Jackson Bate, Northrop Frye, and Roy Harvey Pearce to mention only a few—reveals that the recent alternatives to the New Criticism are really not substantially different from it at all. A destructive reading of Bate, Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, and to a lesser extent, Paul de Man, shows that they all are caught within essentially the same metaphysical tradition. To varying degrees all of these critics are dedicated—consciously or not—to the project of preserving the static existence of an aesthetic order—known most commonly as “the tradition"—as an alternative to the radical flux, disorder, nothingness and death which characterizes the world. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the a-temporal critical stake in the preservation of this “tradition” as well as the inevitable perversion of poetry which is the agency of this preservation.

Although the dissertation seemingly has two successive parts—a critical destruction of the Modern critical mind and a destructive reading of the poetry of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson—the structure of the dissertation is “actually” circular. For the most part, the condition for the possibility of performing the destruction of the traditional critical rhetorics in chapters one through three is an awareness of the nature of the poetry of “interpretation” or “destruction” which makes up the second part. In other words, experientially, the second half of this dissertation must have occurred first. The readings of the poems do not grow out of the “method” derived in the first chapters; rather, the awareness that the critical tradition needs to be destroyed emerges from my understanding that a great portion of Modern poetry refuses to be coerced into the concrete universals and aesthetic monads of Modern criticism. The Modern critical tradition begins to crack under a close reading of Wallace Stevens’ poems, and it “breaks down” completely when it is brought into contact with the poetry of Whitman and Olson.

Recommended Citation

Bové, Paul A., "A "new literary history" of modern poetry: history and deconstruction in the works of Whitman, Stevens, and Olson" (1975). Graduate Dissertations and Theses . 252. https://orb.binghamton.edu/dissertation_and_theses/252

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Nature and poetry: An ecocritical approach to modern poetry (from the Romantic age to the ecological age)

Deuk Ju Jeon , University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Ecocritical theory investigates the relationship between human activities and the natural world, particularly in terms of the influence of each upon the other. Within this broad theoretical field, ecofeminist theory studies women's particular impact on the relationships between the human and natural worlds, and women's potentials to promote the desirable human relationships to the natural world as a way to get over the environmental crisis today. When it foremost stresses sensual and spiritual experience with the outer world for individual and cultural changes, the function of art as healing power is stressed. This is an effort for the recovery of human organic (or primordial) unity with nature in which the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity blurs. This dissertation examines two groups of poets to trace in the earlier group the beginnings of an ecocritical (or “green”) consciousness and in the later group two manifestations of this consciousness. The Romantic poetics, which sees poetry as emotional communication with the outer world as William Hazlitt articulates, presupposes the human organic unity with nature. William Wordsworth expresses the unity as the light of things (on the part of the nature) and “the noble capability to be elevated without gross and violent stimulants” (on the part of human beings): joy is the outer expression of the unity. While Wordsworth mostly resorts to the memory of the experience of his earlier years, John Clare embodies the feelings that Wordsworth philosophizes. For Clare, nature is poetry itself, and he claims that he picks up his poems from nature. Without a transcendent self, he most resorts to a sensory approach to nature. Catherine Ann Dorset, Mary Howitt, Mary Anne Browne, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon who are almost forgotten Romantic poets embody in their poems the women's potentials or wisely use the traditional parallel between women and nature. Dorset and Howitt's mother personas introduce the young reader to the natural world. While Dorset teaches the importance of emotion in human existence in the way David Ehrenfeld uses, Howitt imparts Wordsworthian joy in appreciating natural creatures, crediting value of humor reminiscent of Joseph Meeker's idea of comedy for survival. Browne defines a clearly spiritual relationship between the human and natural worlds. Landon, the late Romantic, creates a female poetics that uses elements of nature and the natural world as figurations for a personal examination of women's status in both the public and the private worlds of mid-nineteenth-century England. Because American poetry inherited much of the Romantic heritage, this dissertation considers two American poets who have drawn ecocritics' attention: Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry depicts a world of “inhumanism” in which nature is neither sentimentalized nor subjectified, and in contrast to Jeffers, Gary Snyder who creates a poetry (and a poetics) that is grounded in the poet's personal experience with Zen and seeks to reconcile the supposedly irreconcilable modern division between humans and the natural world. Snyder's work culminates the consideration of human and non-human relations that is a central subject of all the poets examined here, and it suggests a healthy method for restoring the historical equilibrium and interdependence of these two realms that has been eroded in the modern industrial age.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|American literature|Womens studies

Recommended Citation

Jeon, Deuk Ju, "Nature and poetry: An ecocritical approach to modern poetry (from the Romantic age to the ecological age)" (2004). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln . AAI3142086. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3142086

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• Princeton University Doctoral Dissertations, 2011-2024

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On Modern Poetry

• Guido Mazzoni
• Translated by: Zakiya Hanafi
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Copyright year: 2022
• Main content: 240
• Keywords: Contemporary Poetry ; History of Modern Poetry ; Theory of Poetry ; Theory of the Lyric ; Nineteenth-century Poetry ; Twentieth-century Poetry ; Twenty-first-century Poetry ; History of Literary Genres ; Modern Literary Theory ; Contemporary Literary Theory
• Published: April 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9780674276291

Modern Poetry

Apr 26, 2024

We will read major poems by the most important poets in English in the twentieth century, from the period post-WW I disillusionment, through WW II internationalism and beyond.  Our special focus this term will be on how the concept of “the Image”evolved during this period. The War had undercut beliefs in master-narratives of nationalism and empire, and the language-systems that supported them (religious transcendence, rationalism, and formalism). Retrieving energies from the Symbolist movements of the preceding century and from turn-of-the-century technologies of vision, early twentieth-century poets began to rethink how images carry information, and in what ways the visual, visionary, and verbal image can take the place of transcendent beliefs. New theories of linguistics and anthropology helped to advance this interest in the artistic/religious/social image. So did Freud. So did Charlie Chaplin. So did the invention of the snapshot. We will read poems that pay attention both to this disillusionment and to the compensatory joyous attention to the image: to ideas of the poet as language priest, aesthetic experience as displaced religious impulse, to poems as faith, ritual, and cultural form– and to poems as witness of the ordinary, the joyous, the goofy, the strange. Poets whose work we will read include: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop. Several short papers, class presentations, no final exam. Several visiting poets, slams, readings and performances.

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From Anna Liffey to Ann Lovett: The Search for Female Embodiment in Contemporary Irish Poetry Open Access

Connolly, margaret (spring 2021).

This thesis analyzes the spectrum of ways in which women portray themselves and are portrayed in contemporary Irish poetry. In the first chapter of this thesis, I argue that Eavan Boland’s critique of the passive woman in canonical poetry was a necessary and powerful mode of entering the patriarchal Irish poetic tradition, as Boland’s poetic subjects serve as new symbols for who women are and what their role in Irish literature is. Boland’s poems portray women who are representations of the shift in the Mother Ireland tradition, shifts toward women who are more realistic but are nonetheless symbols for Ireland and generalizations of Irish women. In the second chapter, I argue that some of Boland’s poems do not engage with this particular portrayal of womanhood as her work begins looking towards a closer representation of embodied women through the depictions of artifactual women. I argue in Chapter 2 that Seamus Heaney also establishes an artifactual positioning of the women in his bog body poems, noting the fact that the bog bodies, by virtue of their preservation, are already artifacts and thus not capable of being embodied. In Chapter 3 of this thesis, I explore various Boland poems that depict real women and real bodies but do not find any examples of a more holistic and truer embodiment in her poetry. For more embodied subjects, I turn to the poetry of Sinéad Morrissey and Caitríona O’Reilly, two contemporary Irish female writers who come close to the realm of embodiment by describing and understanding their own experiences and their own bodies in their poems. I trace the spectrum of ways in which contemporary Irish writers portray women, from Boland’s new Irish symbol to the artifactual poems which permeate her work as well as that of Heaney to the nearly embodied women that Morrissey and O’Reilly write. However, I conclude that full embodiment is not possible through language, but language is one means through which subjects might approach and understand their own bodies.

Table of Contents

Preface ……………………………………………………………………………………...…….................... 1

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………..................… 4

Chapter 1: Eavan Boland’s Critique of Mother Ireland ………………………………...…….........…14

Chapter 2: Women’s Bodies as Artifacts in the Poetry of Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney....35

Chapter 3: Writing the Body in Contemporary Irish Poetry ……………………..…………….........62

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...…....................81

Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………..…………...................……86

About this Honors Thesis

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Tarlo, Harriet Ann Bowen. "H.D.'s Helen in Egypt : origins, processes and genres." Thesis, Durham University, 1994. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1039/.

Platt, Mary Hartley. "Epic reduction : receptions of Homer and Virgil in modern American poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9d1045f5-3134-432b-8654-868c3ef9b7de.

Manecke, Keith Gordon. "On location the poetics of place in modern American poetry /." Connect to this title online, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1070218804.

Xiong, Ying. "Herbs and Beauty: Gendered Poethood and Translated Affect in Late Imperial and Modern China." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23739.

Gilbert, Matthew. "Fir-Flower Petals on a Wet Black Bough: Constructing New Poetry through Asian Aesthetics in Early Modernist Poets." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3588.

Cole, Merrill. "The other Orpheus : a poetics of modern homosexuality /." New York [u.a.] : Routledge, 2003. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip042/2003007030.html.

Stubbs, Tara M. C. "'Irish by descent' : Marianne Moore, Irish writers and the American-Irish Inheritance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf87b5ea-4baa-4a46-9509-2c59e738e2a1.

Essert, Emily Margaret. "A modernist menagerie: representations of animals in the work of five North American Poets." Thesis, McGill University, 2013. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=114133.

Barker, Jennifer. "The aesthetics of resistance modernism and antifascism /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3178431.

Radway, John North. "The Fate of Epic in Twentieth-Century American Poetry." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:26718713.

Carney, Jason R. "The Shadow Modernism of Weird Tales: Experimental Pulp Fiction in the Age of Modernist Reflection." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396650887.

Luck, Jessica Lewis. "Gray matters contemporary poetry and the poetics of cognition /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3215175.

Soud, William David. "Toward a divinised poetics : God, self, and poeisis in W.B. Yeats, David Jones, and T.S. Eliot." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:331a692d-a40c-4d30-a05b-f0d224eb0055.

Allen, Edward Joseph Frank. "Lyric technologies : the sound media of American modernist poetry." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708318.

Rinner, Jenifer. "Midcentury American Poetry and the Identity of Place." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/18524.

Richardson, C. Scott. "Taking the repeats: Modern American poetry in imitation of eighteenth-century musical forms." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9311.

Niven, Alex F. "Basil Bunting's late modernism : from Pound to poetic community." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c6d887a6-0e63-440d-9959-0791168bce5b.

Ghaderi, Farangis. "The emergence and development of modern Kurdish poetry." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/22267.

Dunkle, Iris Jamahl. "Shaking the Burning Birch Tree: Amy Lowell’s Sapphic Modernism." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1259612760.

Stanton, Brandi. "On location race and family in the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Cathy Song /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3378394.

Richardson, Scott. "Taking the repeats: Modern American poetry in imitation of eighteenth-century musical forms." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20986.

Lagapa, Jason S. "Inarticulate prayers: Irony and religion in late twentieth-century poetry." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280295.

Harter, Odile. "In Others' Words: Poetry, Quotation, and the Great Depression." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10629.

Rupert, John. ""Notations of process of mind" in American poetry since 1945: Readings in Creeley, Whalen, Kerouac, and Ginsberg." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ28373.pdf.

Webster, Christine Lynn. "Immortalizing the Human Spirit: Analyzing Faulkner through Schopenhauer." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2015. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/328601.

McRae, Shannon. "A dream of purely burning : myth, gender and modernism /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9479.

Strittmatter, Jorge Emilio. "Tres Poetas con Heráclito: Borges, Hahn, Pacheco." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1188431523.

Moudry, Nick. "A Foreign Mirror: Intertexts with Surrealism in Twentieth-Century U. S. Poetries." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2012. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/202600.

Wender, Stephan. "Between the self and the public : the co-implication of American literary naturalism and modernism in the modern urban narrative /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3162270.

Moses, Geoffrey. "THE LACK OF A FUTURE:UTOPIAN ABSENCE AND LONGING IN TWENTIETH- AND TWENTY-FIRST- CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1365784335.

Guzman-Medrano, Gael. "Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction by the Turn of the 21st Century." FIU Digital Commons, 2013. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/917.

Michaud, James. "Deconstructing the representation of AIDS in poetry." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0001/MQ42414.pdf.

Moffett, Joe. "The search for origins in the twentieth-century long poem : Sumerian, Homeric, Anglo-Saxon /." Morgantown, W. Va. : West Virginia University Press, 2007. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=015671691&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.

Wheeler, Belinda. "At the center of American modernism Lola Ridge's politics, poetics, and publishing /." Connect to resource online, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/1683.

Knickerbocker, Scott Bousquet. "Modern ecopoetics : the language of nature/the nature of language /." view abstract or download file of text, 2006. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1232423261&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=11238&RQT=309&VName=PQD.

Hyde, Marissa Cathryn. "Personage and Post-Adolescence in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1611535243379139.

Piantanida, Cecilia. "Classical lyricism in Italian and North American 20th-century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4422c01a-ba88-4fe0-a21f-4804e4c610ce.

Laffey, Seth Edward. "The Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Digital Edition (1889-1895)." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1499369594701871.

Greve, Curt Michael. "Raw." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton1311189062.

Maye, Sylvia Renee. "Fade to Black." University of Dayton / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=dayton1354302272.

Davis, Peter. ""Woven Into the Deeps of Life": Death, Redemption, and Memory in Bob Kaufman's Poetry." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2019. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/pomona_theses/220.

Elizondo, Luna Roberto Carlos. "Medusa House." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1429271265.

Main, Sarah. ""Enacting the Story of Her Life": The Written Legacies and Enduring Mis/Perceptions of Zelda Fitzgerald." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1564749555581709.

Dudas, Stephen P. "Bumps in the Night." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1376407973.

Copenhaver, Bonny Ball. "A portrayal of gender and a description of gender roles in selected American modern and postmodern plays." [Johnson City, Tenn. : East Tennessee State University], 2002. http://etd-submit.etsu.edu/etd/theses/available/etd-0212102-095131/unrestricted/copenhaverb.pdf.

Neely, Elizabeth. "Elizabeth Bishop in Brasil: An Ongoing Acculturation." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc700061/.

McCrotty, Micah. "North of Ourselves: Identity and Place in Jim Wayne Miller’s Poetry." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2019. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3581.

Nieves, John A. "Ashes from Falling Stars." Scholar Commons, 2006. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3766.

Crowley, Dale Allen. "Eldritch Horrors: The Modernist Liminality of H.P. Lovecraft's Weird Fiction." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1496326220734249.

Slaven, Craig D. "Southern Transfiguration: Competing Cultural Narratives of (Ec)centric Religion in the Works of Faulkner, O’Connor, and Hurston." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/31.

Content, form and technique of traditional and modern praise poetry in Northern Sotho

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The Problem With Taylor Swift’s New Album

The tortured poets department isn’t a great breakup album. it’s something newer and tricksier, for us modern idiots..

“Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all,” Taylor Swift sings on “But Daddy I Love Him.” It’s the song on which her new album The Tortured Poets Department finally gains some momentum, six tracks in. It’s also the one on which the 34-year-old billionaire, who is one of the most famous humans on the planet, finally dares rebel a little bit against her parents. Even if partly tongue-in-cheek and via a Little Mermaid reference .

“Dutiful daughter” Swift always has been ultraprotective of her mom and dad, who are also part of her management team, so it’s more shocking to hear Swift sing “I just learned these people only raise you to cage you” than any of the abundant curses and feints at sex talk that pepper the album. Pretending she’s pregnant by the bad boy of whom they disapprove—just to see the looks on their faces—is one of the best of the jokes with which Swift tries (and sometimes strains) to alleviate the core sadness of this collection of songs.

The second half of the track makes another startling pivot when she directs much of the same sarcastic ire at some of her own fan base, which she’s always carefully trained to view her as a mutually adoring best friend or big sister. No doubt a lot of them boggled momentarily at the pregnancy claim too. But what a sense of release when Swift calls out the “judgmental creeps” among them “who say they want what’s best for me” but then hound her online about the choices she’s made in her private life.

What feels less healthy, and not so grown-up, is that the former child star still can’t seem to feel good about herself without seeking out enemies she can complain are treating her unfairly. Seven years ago, when she put out Reputation , Swift really was dealing with widespread backlash spearheaded by her antagonists Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (whom she, unbelievably, takes time out to feud with some more in the back half of this “anthology”). Four years ago, she had some reasonably legit grievances against business associates that prompted the ongoing and startlingly successful Taylor’s Version project of re-recording her old albums to claim ownership of the recordings. But in 2024, in the midst of the ongoing “Eras” tour, the highest-grossing in history, today’s Swift faces less reactionary public hostility than pretty much any star in her position ever has—Elvis, Madonna, Michael Jackson, you name it. You like Swift, I like Swift, and people who don’t like her mostly recognize there’s no percentage in fighting over it.

Hell, in 1966, people were burning Beatles albums in the streets because John Lennon had joked that the band was then more popular than Jesus. I doubt Swift will get any such grief for portraying herself as a Christlike figure in at least two songs here (singing “What if I roll the stone away?/ They’re gonna crucify me anyway” in “Guilty as Sin?” and “I would have died for your sins” in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”). Then again, what doesn’t Swift compare herself with in the course of the 31-count-’em-31 lyrically crammed tracks on The Tortured Poets Department , if you include the 15 that suddenly appeared in the middle of the night after the album was supposedly already out?

In such a state of excitation, looking around for a backlash and seeing practically none, Swift can only resort to accusing the people who do love her, like her family and her fans, of loving her the wrong way. Now she’s upset about her good reputation: “I’ll tell you something about my good name,” she sings, “it’s mine alone to disgrace.”

A similar state of mind is evident in the aspect of the album to which the world reacted most immediately when Poets leaked Thursday: It mostly isn’t about what everyone thought it would be about, the breakup last spring of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, which surely must have been, as Swift sings on “LOML,” not only the love but the loss of her life. Instead, it seems to dwell obsessively on a brief affair with another pop star, the aforementioned disapproved-of bad boy and “tattooed golden retriever” we all assume is Matty Healy from U.K. band the 1975. In the versified introduction in the album liner notes, Swift writes, “A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face. Because it’s the worst men that I write best.” And that feels like the true explanation. I don’t question that Swift’s craving and anguish were genuine enough at the time, but focusing on the tumultuous affair instead of the lengthy partnership allows her to reach back into her usual bag, to deploy the same range of voices as in the songs she’s spent most of the album’s two-year gestation period singing in stadiums. How could she generate that trademark Taylor Swift melodramatic emotion from the muted adult miseries of a slow-dissolving domestic partnership, without a villain to skewer? Moreover, how long could she stand to linger over that weightier, less easily processed loss, to capture it fully in song?

She’s proved she has the capacity. She did it on “ You’re Losing Me ,” a quietly wrenching single she released back in November. She does it on this album’s “ So Long, London ” (in the fifth-track slot that Swift famously reserves for gut-punchers), which deals with the fact that losing a person often comes together with losing a place, whether geographical or simply a grounding in familiar settings and routines. There’s an extension of that idea in the first bonus or “anthology” track (and frankly one of only a handful of worthwhile ones there), “The Black Dog.” It takes off from the very modern-love conceit of finding that you can still track a former partner’s location on your phone because he “forgot to turn it off.” Swift observes her ex patronizing a bar called the Black Dog (a phrase that was also Winston Churchill’s term for depression ) and begins fixating on what he might be doing there, perhaps meeting other women, perhaps hearing one of their favorite songs, perhaps not missing her. Why can’t she stop these thoughts? Because, she sing-shouts, “old habits die screaming.”

And then there is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” likely the album’s most pop-friendly anthem and, oddly, despite its scenario being so specific to the condition of being Taylor Swift, the one that perhaps makes the protagonist’s emotions easiest to identify with. Most people dealing with devastating life events may not have to get up in front of tens of thousands of screaming people and pretend “like it’s my birthday every day.” But we do have to swallow our feelings, go to work, and put on a mask. It uses the trick of wedding upbeat music to despairing lyrics, gaining extra poignancy from the contrast—but doubly so because that contradiction is also what the song is about . And the track’s special force is that Swift knows that the listeners have seen her doing what she’s describing, whether in person or in the “Eras” tour movie or in the countless hundreds of hours of tour clips of her online.

Together, these songs suggest an alternate album that could have been, a breakup album more like the classics of the type , a kind of spiritual sequel to Red but from an adult point of view. Instead, she gets there only via lengthy detours, with mixed metaphors piling up to block the off-ramps. The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t show much growth lyrically beyond the Folklore stage. Musically, it carries on mostly in the manner of her past few albums, Midnights especially, with co-producers and co-writers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner architecting the ambiences in which Swift’s stories can take place, but with few of them solidifying into juggernauts that carry the listener away. Vague verses might transition into vivid choruses stymied by run-on-sentence bridges (e.g., about what fingers rings go on), or vice-versa-and-reversa. The scatterings of fuck s often seem to stand in for truly visceral, embodied evocations of eros and animus. It’s more of a stream-of-consciousness assemblage of parts than of gratifying stand-alone works of the kind you may associate with Swift albums past. I’m a staunch defender of Antonoff , and he does some excellent work here—the sultry contours of “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” the giddily trashy grand guignol of “Florida!!!” with Florence and the Machine. But a person definitely can get to missing Max Martin and the definitive shape and hooks of a song like “Blank Space.”

I could blame this on her crew’s superfluous productivity. No one was forcing Swift to release another album so quickly (her fourth in four years without counting the re-records and all their bonus material), much less 31 songs. But between her workaholism and the economic incentives of the streaming era, the ethos is the more the better. And given her place in the music-industry food chain, there’s nobody to say no, nobody to serve as an editor, nobody even to voice the dreaded old label complaint “We don’t hear a hit.” But that may be far too conservative and old-fashioned a way to take TTPD . It’s the arc of the album as a whole (bonus tracks not included) that’s really satisfying, more than individual songs. What it offers instead of bangers are unruly passages back and forth through the stages of grief, as Swift hinted at with the themed playlists she made for fans earlier this month. The original impact of the breakup is absorbed by the all-consuming rebound affair (which some songs suggest was already waiting lustily in the wings), then it in turn falls apart, and the protagonist finds refuge and fulfillment in the artistic work itself. Even then, with the coda, “Clara Bow,” in which Swift parallels herself with that 1920s “it” girl and with Stevie Nicks in the 1970s, she counsels herself to remember that this too shall pass; her star must fade, like those of every generation. (I’m leaving out the part about a redemptive new love , because the football-metaphor-blitzed song “The Alchemy” and its bonus-track correlate “So High School” seem so weak and tossed-off as to be wholly extraneous, as if included only as a courtesy to the party in question.)

My friend and colleague Ann Powers calls TTPD novelistic . But I think that is also too much of a throwback, despite the album’s capital-R Romantic literary airs, equal parts sincere and in jest. It’s just as much like a role-playing game in which you and Taylor set off on a joint expedition while simultaneously engaged in dense, meandering cross-talk. As Swift cracks to her paramour on the title track, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/ This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.”

As I’ve said ever since Reputation , I resist bringing celebrity gossip to bear on thinking about artists’ work, but on this album it is all but formally part of the music, just as on rap beef tracks . All the “Easter egg” details and name-dropping (“you told Lucy … and I had said that to Jack”) practically force the listener to read the songs via the stories we’ve gotten from the news and social media. Swift knows that fans are going to do it anyway, and she long ago chose to feed it rather than fight it, even if she reserves the right to kvetch about it. As “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” reminds us, Taylor Swift–style feminism may not mean having it all, but it does mean getting to have it both ways, to be both the threatened and the threat—or, as she puts it on “Cassandra,” both Eve and the snake .

The Tortured Poets Department might be the fullest realization yet of Swift album as multimedia work. Forget visual albums. Here, every photo, film clip, article, rumor, and stray online comment in the world is in a sense part of the text, and we are all participants as well as spectators. It’s a more-than-three-dimensional portrait of the modern superstar caught in extremis, with heartbreak serving as a CAT scan to illuminate more of the interior of our global avatar.

Through this rendering process, Swift hopes to liberate herself. As tedious as I find many of the “anthology” tracks, I was moved to tears by the final one, “The Manuscript.” There, she looks back on a past relationship with an older man, no doubt one of the subjects of her classic kiss-off songs of the 2010s. She finds those emotions safely distant now, simply part of the story she’s woven into her musical score. “The only thing that’s left is the manuscript,” she sings. “The story isn’t mine anymore.” As she wrote recently on Instagram, “Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it.” Mind you, as “thanK you aIMee” demonstrates (decode the capital letters), Taylor Alison Swift has to our knowledge never in her life let anything go. But as an aspiration, it’s a very grown-up one to have.

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Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" wasn't just good. According to Billboard, it was "historic."

By Li Cohen

Updated on: April 29, 2024 / 7:51 AM EDT / CBS News

If you can't get enough of Taylor Swift's latest album, "The Tortured Poets Department," you're not alone. Billboard said on Sunday that the long-awaited album made a "historic" debut that puts her in a tie with Jay-Z for the most No. 1s among soloists, as the album saw the "largest streaming week for an album ever." 

" The Tortured Poets Department " was released on April 19, featuring more than two dozen tracks believed to revolve around several of Swift's relationships, including The 1975 singer Matty Healy, actor Joe Alwyn and current beau, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. 

Billboard said the album, which Swift announced during her Grammys acceptance speech in February, made a "gigantic debut," hitting No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, which ranks a week's most popular albums in the U.S. That milestone marks the 34-year-old pop star's 14th chart-topping album, Billboard said, tying her with hip-hop mogul Jay-Z for having the most No. 1 albums among soloists. 

Every single one of Swift's full-length studio albums and projects since the release of "Fearless" in 2008 have debuted at No. 1. She and Jay-Z are only surpassed by The Beatles for most No. 1s, who have 19. Of the 10 artists who have had at least 10 No. 1s on the Billboard 200, Swift is only one of two women, the other being Barbra Streisand, who has had 11 No. 1s, tied with Bruce Springsteen and Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. 

The album also hit another milestone – "the largest streaming week for an album ever," Billboard said, with 891.34 million official streams of the album's 31 songs. 

"The Tortured Poets Department" saw 2.61 million equivalent album units earned by the end of last week. Digital downloads, CDs, vinyl LPS and cassettes made up 1.914 million of that total. The vinyl sales alone were monumental, with 859,000 album units earned, marking "the largest sales week for an album on vinyl in the modern era," Billboard said. 

Swift's latest record has surpassed Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter" for the top-selling album of 2024 – by far. While "Cowboy Carter" has sold 228,000 copies, "The Tortured Poets Department" has hit more than 1.9 million sales. 

• Taylor Swift

Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.

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