Taylor’s Version: How Taylor Swift Captured Our Hearts and Conquered the World

A preeminent Harvard professor and poetry expert explains the artistry--and the celebrity--of Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift has become a peerless superstar, ceaselessly productive and internationally beloved. From her teen country debut to her Eras tour and beyond, Swift’s career and her creations have captivated and bewitched us, opening up new ways to see both her life and our own.

In Taylor’s Version, the poet and literary scholar Stephanie Burt offers an insightful and heartfelt critical appreciation of Taylor Swift, her body of work, and the community that her art has fostered. Drawing from her 2024 Harvard course, Taylor Swift and Her World, as well as from her years as a Swiftie, Burt examines Swift’s particular form of genius - not the destructive genius of tortured poets, but the collaborative and joyful genius of an artist who has mastered her craft. She highlights the ways Swift’s work remains at once intimate and relatable, portraying people we feel that we know and people we wish we could be, from the first loves and girlhoods on Fearless through the public and private angst of Midnights. How does she do it (with a broken heart)?

Tracing a path through the Eras, Taylor’s Version shows what Swift has created, how it works, and why her songs will endure.

Stephanie Burt is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. She received a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts selected her book of poems Advice from the Lights as a national Big Read pick. Her work appears regularly in the New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, London Review of Books, and other journals. Her other books of poetry and literary criticism--fourteen in all--include We Are Mermaids and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems. She lives in Massachusetts.