7 Songs That Reference Tortured Poets

Dear listeners,

Perhaps you have heard that Taylor Swift has a new album out today — just a wild guess! — and that it is called “The Tortured Poets Department.” That title alone generated chatter before anyone had heard a note, and it got me thinking about some of my favorite songs that reference poets. And so I filled my inkwell, put a quill pen to my chin and cried, “A playlist is in order!”

Though there are no Swift songs on this mix, it does feature the two poets she name-checks on her latest album: Dylan Thomas (in a shaggy ode written by Better Oblivion Community Center) and that most poetic of rock stars, Patti Smith. It is also significantly shorter than “The Tortured Poets Department” and its 15-song companion piece (known together as “The Anthology”), which, as I suggest in my review of Swift’s album, is not necessarily a bad thing. And no, my friends, this playlist does not contain any Charlie Puth.

It does, however, highlight songs by the Smiths, Bob Dylan, Lana Del Rey and more. Grab your favorite notebook, find a particularly pastoral patch of grass to lie in, and press play.

Keats and Yeats are on your side,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.

1. Better Oblivion Community Center: “Dylan Thomas”

There are plenty of quotable lines on this jangly, stomping highlight from the sole album released by Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers’s side project, Better Oblivion Community Center, but I am partial to this one: “I’m getting used to these dizzy spells/I’m takin’ a shower at the Bates Motel.”

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