Patti Smith “moved” to be mentioned in Taylor Swift’s new album

Taylor Swift pays tribute to poetry legends. In her new album, released Friday, the 34-year-old singer had fun slipping in a few literary quotes. Starting with the title of the record, The Tortured Poets Department, a reference to the film The Circle of Dead Poets, released in 1989, the year Taylor Swift was born. In the eponymous song, she evokes the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, known for having hosted major writers and authors, but also the poet Dylan Thomas and the “godmother of punk”, Patti Smith.

“I laughed in your face and said, ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith. This is not the Chelsea Hotel. We're modern idiots,'” Taylor Swift sings in The Tortured Poets Department. In addition to telling a man - Matty Healy, singer of The 1975, according to fans - that he is not talented, the singer mocks artists, in this case poets, who place "their self-destructive nature at the center of their art,” explains Stéphanie Burt, professor of English and Taylor Swift at Harvard, in the columns of the Times. “He [the man] is not that good, and she [Taylor Swift] is not that dramatic. Or rather, she dramatizes in a different, much more deliberate way,” says Stéphanie Burt.

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The reference to tortured poets did not escape Patti Smith, who was quick to thank the singer on social networks. “This is to say that I was moved to be mentioned in the company of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas,” she wrote in the caption of an Instagram photo in which she brandished Portrait of the artist in young dog, collection of autobiographical short stories.

On Friday, Taylor Swift also spoke on social networks, explaining to her 283 million followers the meaning of her double album. The Tortured Poets Department is “an anthology of new works that reflect the events, opinions and feelings of a fleeting, fatalistic moment,” she explained. This period, “both sensational and painful” is now over and “only tortured poetry remains”, concludes the singer. To celebrate the release of this album, but also its previous “eras”, Taylor Swift launched a world tour of nearly 150 dates. Next month, the singer will be in Paris and will give four concerts in a row, from May 9 to 12.