He Profile of a social network It says more than it seems. Interests, ideas, location, affective links. But it can also function as a photograph of the time we inhabit, a synchronous image of what the world values, projects and consumes.
In this theater of digital representation, where identity is manufactured with images, short phrases and symbols of belonging, Taylor Swift has built a figure that seems to go against the speed and fleeting: that of a melancholic, introspective artist. In its official account it can be read: “In love and poetry, everything is worth.” A slogan that, far from being innocent, points to an aesthetic path. And strategic.
Sad poets (happy mainstream)
His last work“The department of tortured poets” (2024)edited in various formats and extension, it is not only a global success identified with the acronym TTPD, but also a narrative commitment. Swift has said that some songs are written with “past fashionable verses, as if they were a 19th -century poet that writes in candlelight.” He refers to album letters, icons like Casandra or Emily Dickinson, passing through Dylan Thomas or Neruda. He wonders, if to see visions, he is bad, crazy or wise (“Guilty as without?”). They are perceived by building sand castles that others destroy (“My Boy Only Breaks His favorite toys”). In a time that celebrates immediacy, she invokes shadows, candlesticks and sad ink. It will be that to be a poet today you still have to suffer.
That figure, that of the tortured poet, has a recognizable genealogy. César Vallejo, for example, wandering in Paris (at this point a global capital of poetry), poor and misunderstood, anticipating his death in premonitory verses. Lord Byron, Bécquer, Coleridge, Dumas, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Víctor Hugo. All of them, also Sarmiento in our country, with their “Facundo”, were part of a romanticism that claimed the subjectivity, pain and resistance of the individual in front of the order.
Romanticism: from candle to algorithm
He romanticismemerged after the French Revolution, put the “I” in the center: unique, unrepeatable, emotional. He opposed the enlightened logic that looked at people as rational gears of a system. Instead, He exalted the internal conflict, the tension with the environment, the idea that the human soul is a force in struggle with the world.
In the 21st century, that “I” survives as can. It must be integrated into an economic and productive system that requires it active, useful, available. But it should also be genuine, different, faithful to itself. A permanent tension. Is it possible to keep the essence itself and, at the same time, be part of society? Can you live in the present without giving in to your rules?
Often, that “I” ends up beaten by conventions, by the majorities, by the state devices designed to guarantee coexistence. And yet, the idea of individual freedom resists, sometimes converted into collective freedoms, in constructions of national identities that combine more or less idealized past and current demands.
At that cross, Taylor Swift appears. In addition to being a hyper talented artist, it is an eminence of marketing. His decision to assume himself as a poet and claim a romantic sensitivity, convinced that “old habits die screaming” (“The Black Dog”) is also a cultural and identity play. In a world that runs behind the immediate, she stops in pain. In an industry that banalizes, she dramatizes. And convert that intensity into content, in product, in brand sentenceing: “I built a legacy/that you cannot undo” (“Tank you almee”
Poetry, meanwhile, remains a marginal genre. In many libraries he has no section of his own (and will never have it). Not even the Nobel to Louise Glück in 2020 promoted reissues or a significant demand for readers. When one of the authors of this note, directing a recognized editorial seal, proposed to launch a collection of Latin American poetic anthologies, he found surprising approaches (only dissipated when one of those works won the Casa de las Américas Award).
Being a poet, yesterday and today, implies more than writing: it means accepting a certain degree of marginality. That a figure like Taylor Swift manages to turn that stereotype into a commercial and symbolic strength is still suggestive and relevant.
Our century, a collage
Through the veins of the 21st century, illustrated blood mixed with bits, artificial intelligence and selfies; But the romantic also flows, the one that was lost among the cobblestones, turning them into islands, as he wrote (surely distressed) Charles Baudelaire, with his exaltation of emotions, individual autonomy and, why not, a certain narcissism.
We are the inheritance of traumatic disappointments that perhaps had their initial point in Paris, 1789. And here we are, in this centuria that sometimes seems to copy past fashions while still looking for its identityd. Then Taylor Swift says in the networks that he writes songs with melancholic ink on a paper barely illuminated by a candil that reflects his own shadow, which is where his publicized world of torment and conflict arrives But what happens on your dark side? We risk the response of “I Can Do with Broken Heart”: “All pieces of me shattered while the crowd shouted: More!”
Taylor confesses in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me”: “I was meek, I was a gentle until the life of Circus I had cruel … I am what I am because you trained me” Does Swift subvert the order established with its “tortured poet” figure? Or rather reinforce it, by converting suffering into monetizable content and trending? While the public has the last word, the artist will sing forever, as I beg: “I wish I could forget / how we almost had everything” (“Loml”).
