Are you ready for it? Students in a brand-new English class certainly are. Taught by DeWitt Wallace Professor of English and Creative Writing James Dawes, “Emily Dickinson and Taylor Swift” provides students with an opportunity to discuss the works of the two titular women.
In this English and Creative Writing topics course, students learn, analyze and engage with the works of Taylor Swift, ranging from her songs to her music videos, alongside Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Using Swift’s and Dickinson’s work, students create a comparative literary analysis that links these two tortured poets to each other.
While familiar with Dickinson’s work, Dawes was relatively unacquainted with Swift’s work and her rising fanbase prior to teaching this class. Dawes realized that Swift’s work could be studied in a collegiate setting through learning an invisible string between her and the poet – Dickinson and Swift are distantly related.
“If you had asked me to identify Taylor Swift in a lineup, I would not have been able to do so,” Dawes said. “Once it was drawn attention to me that a modern pop star was Emily Dickinson, and I began looking into who this modern pop star was, it became clear she’s famous, and maybe one [of the most] recognizable humans on the planet.”
Dawes’ introduction to Taylor Swift came through listening to Swift’s sister albums of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” released in 2020, and studying them academically. On these albums, Swift does not write from an autobiographical lens, rather she adopts perspectives from different fictional characters and storylines. Dawes began exploring Swift’s discography further and drew multiple parallels between Dickinson and Swift in aspects of literature and social and gender dynamics. Dawes also began to unravel how both Dickinson and Swift understood their fame and realized that something about these two poets hits different.
“They represent these two real extreme poles of gendered celebrity and how they’re treated as celebrities,” Dawes said. “On the one hand, Dickinson leaned into extreme exclusion, extreme isolation, extreme image control and scarcity of connection and Taylor Swift has become this almost psychologically improbable figure of interiority becom[ing] pure publicity. … And this spectrum of what it means to come to be a woman in public and at the public gaze has led to oddly remarkably similar treatment.”
As a part of this class, students focus on a specific set of Swift’s songs, which Dawes instructs his students to play on repeat as homework along with completing a literary analysis of them. Dawes said that studying both the lyrical and musical content of the songs is necessary to see how tone and intense connection through the music can change the meaning of Swift’s words.
“I’ve noticed that mostly when analyzing songs we as a class tend to focus on lyrics and largely ignore the musicality, but the times we have discussed it in class, it’s revealed a lot of intentionality behind the instrumentation and other musical choices,” Riley Gaikowski ’29, a student in the class, wrote in an email to The Mac Weekly.
While Dawes has studied poetry and Dickinson’s writings before, he has found that combining Dickinson’s and Swift’s work presents a unique perspective for how to analyze and engage with literature.
“Most courses I’ve taught tend to be novels or big books and sweeping patches of language that would [be] kind of luxury over long periods of time,” Dawes said. “Pop music and Dickinson similarly, what’s kind of amazing about them is they give themselves just such a small amount of space – 90 words, to accomplish something deeply powerful. And that is an unbelievable accomplishment, and it makes each word so weighted and complex.”
While many students on Macalester’s campus know Swift’s music all too well, some people within the classroom were a bit more inexperienced with her discography.
Gavia Boyden ’26, the preceptor for the class, was not a lover of Swift’s music before the start of this semester.
“I’m not a big Taylor Swift fan. I took the Dickinson class a couple years ago, and [before that class] I also was a big Emily Dickinson hater,” Boyden said. “I thought her poems were pretty annoying. … Over the time that I spent taking that class, I really grew to like and admire Emily Dickinson, and I feel like the same thing will happen for me for Taylor Swift, just because the more you know about someone, the more you respect them.”
While Boyden entered the semester unfamiliar with much of Swift’s work, she has found some poetry in the music that she enjoys.
“One of my favorite ones we’ve looked at so far is ‘mirrorball’,” Boyden said. “Talking about the way that Swift feels as though she is performing again and again [and] people see a reflection of exactly what [they] want to see.”
While most students in this class have enjoyed studying Swift’s work according to Dawes, the class has caused bad blood among some Mac students and even Dawes’ own family. Dawes explained that his college-aged son was fearless in critiquing his father’s ambition to teach this class. Dawes said that this moment taught him that, for as many Swifties there are at colleges, campuses also have a reputation for hating the artist.
“At any place of higher education, people are invested in a sense of high culture, and while they might try to be really open about what they consider canonical or what they consider mainstream, in the end, I think art that’s highly commodified is treated with contempt and suspicion,” Dawes said. “And so pop culture is a problem, especially pop culture that is linked into a really capitalized system of distribution, is treated really suspiciously.”
Dawes believes that the hatred towards Swift can be traced to her crossover to mainstream pop on her “1989” album which drew in more fans, more wealth and overall more popularity. People also began distrusting Swift following her 2016 leaked manipulated recording with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West – later released in its entirety in 2020 – leading people to call her a snake. While Swift’s public image has rebounded over time and her fanbase has grown again throughout the 2020s, the haters are still gonna hate.
“My wife has been [one of] these people heaping contempt upon me for this class,” Dawes said. “I’ll find her hating on Swift, hating on pop, and then I’ll be in the kitchen cooking dinner for the family [with] Taylor Swift playing in the background, and she and my son walk in the room … and unconsciously find themselves dancing [and] snapping. And then they’ll see me seeing them enjoying it, and [they feel] shame being caught enjoying Swift … they become embarrassed and they stop dancing.”
While Dawes thinks the class has been a delicate matter among the Mac community, many students in the class feel the magic in the air that stems from studying Dickinson and Swift together. In some cases, a sweeter-than-fiction outcome has extended beyond the classroom.
“This class has just made me focus on music in an analytical way instead of only listening to and enjoying the songs,” Gaikowski wrote. “This has started to extend to not just the songs we discuss in class, but the songs I listen to in my free time as well, and has given me more ideas for what I can accomplish in the music I write.”
