What Taylor Swift Taught Dante about Poetry (Part I)

Don't Worry, Friends, She'll be back in 2026

I want you to imagine the following scenario: it’s Spring 2026 and Taylor Swift, spurned during the 2025 Grammy Awards, is taking home absolutely everything. Again. She’s back. Again. She wins “best song of the year,” “best female vocalist,” “best album,” “best music video,” and “best costume within a music video.” And then, the anticipated moment arrives: the hostess takes the platform and slowly says, “and the winner for the Artist of the Year is...Taylor Swift!”

Her fans go nuts: they scream and applaud and wipe away tears. Travis Kelce is in the audience and has that smug, slightly intoxicated smile on his face. Taylor slowly ambles toward the podium, waves, says “oh my gosh” several times, and after a long time, even the teenage girls wipe away their tears, let off one last shriek and burst of applause, and settle down so that Taylor can begin her speech:

“This is such a special award to me, but I’ll be honest with you: I. WANT. MORE!”

Fans go nuts again, applauding, screaming, standing, waving. But after they quiet down, Taylor continues:

“No, you don’t understand. It’s been the goal of my life not to be called the best female artist, but best artist. Period.”

Fans go wild again. Swift has to wait almost forty seconds before she begins speaking again.

“No, but even that isn’t enough! I want to be considered the best artist of all time.”

In the midst of wild cheers, one teenage girl yells out, “You already are, Taylor!” Swift continues, talking over the crowd:

“The thing is, I don’t want to be measured by Kanye West (boos from the crowd) or Kendrick Lamar or Beyonce, but by the standards of J. S. Bach, Monteverdi, and Palestrina!”

At this, there’s slight confusion among the fans. The screaming dies out and turns into polite applause. The camera pans over the audience and show lots of people leaning over to their neighbor to ask, “Who’s Monteverdi?”

“And that’s why I’m not going to make a record, or even write a song, for the next ten years!”

Confused whispers and gasps spread throughout the crowd. One teenage girls yells out: “Taylor, no, we need you!” But Swift continues, now beginning to show the blazing eyes of a convicted prophet.

“You see, I’ve enrolled in an online PhD program in musicology through Cambridge University, and over the next five years of course work, I will be taking advanced courses in Guillaume de Machaut, Ockegum, Palestrina, Victoria de Lasso, but especially a composition course in the counterpoint of J. S. Bach.”

Horrified silence. Some people are shaking their heads with concerned looks and muttering, “Why are you doing this?” or “Is Taylor OK?” But Swift goes on, with even more conviction, gazing off into the distance with sparkling eyes.

“You don’t understand. I will be writing Renaissance motets on a weekly basis, and I intend to explore the late Renaissance genre of the fantasia, especially as developed by William Byrd in his late period. I will study tone painting in Handel and Vivaldi, the sonata form of Mozart and Haydn, and take a whole course on rhythm in Monteverdi. Beethoven’s late string quartets will occupy me a whole semester. But more than anything else, as I have mentioned, I intend to take the immortal Bach as my personal tutor, my teacher, even if we are separated by several centuries. I have already purchased the scores for his cantatas and have begun a deep dive into his Well-Tempered Clavier.”

Absolute, total, and horrified silence. But Swift, enraptured with her vision, seems as if she’s a thousand miles away, looking vaguely into the distance, without noticing the distressed looks on her fans’ faces. They, in turn, stare at her with deep concern and compassion.

“And after ten years of music theory, music history, composition work, and even some forays into ethnomusicology,” (at the frightening word, “ethnomusicology,” one teenage girl shrieks and passes out in horror, convinced that Taylor is has lost her mind) “I will then be in a position to write the greatest song that has ever been written, and I will be measured against Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, and yes, the immortal Bach.”

Polite applause, but from an ever smaller subsection of the audience.

“Goodbye, friends. Look for me in 2036!”

Swift, taking her long, ambling strides, exits the stage, accompanied by a mixture of confused whispering, tears, groans, and exclamations of “Poor Taylor!”

Although there are important differences between the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and the early twenty-first-century product of suburban Nashville, I’m starting with this anecdote to bring out an important similarity: Before Dante was famous for being the author of the Comedy—that great, seven-hundred-page, soul-searching, inside-out, desperate quest for God—he was just an author of short love lyric poems, poems anywhere between the fourteen-line sonnet and the hundred-line, philosophical canzone. Think of him at this period of his life—that is, in his 20s—as a medieval singer-songwriter, who, unlike most artists, wasn’t content with one genre or one “sound” or one “vibe,” but rather spent his twenties experimenting in every kind of genre of love lyric poem. By 1295 or so, he had gathered up some of his own youthful poetry into a kind of Eras Anthology, but he also wrote an autobiographical narrative to explain how those scattered lyrical experiments all fit together. The work was called Vita Nuova (New Life). And yes, if you’re counting, Dante was the sort of guy who writes his memoirs before turning thirty. And even though this book was written more than a decade before the Comedy, we can already see how extraordinarily ambitious he was. To begin with, Dante wanted the world to know how he had learned all the important lessons from all his major vernacular predecessors. For instance, there was a Sicilian poet in the generation before, Giacomo da Lentini, who was the poet of saluto/e, that is, the poet who wrote about the dizzying experience of serendipitously encountering the Lady and exchanging greetings with here. Dante spent the first part of the New Life writing about this saluto/e. But, paradoxically, Dante also wanted to develop the dark vibes of a poet like Guido Cavalcanti, the poet of melancholia and the dark side of love, the poet who could describe the intensity of the love experience in the numinous language of religious revelation. And yet, like a third poet Guido Guinizzelli, Dante also wanted to be the poet of sweetness and the poet of praise, who believed that, somehow, someway, there must be a theological reality at the base of even the secular experience of love. Dante, then, was like some ambitious modern singer-songwriter who wants, not just to win a Grammy in country music, but also one in rock, and also one in rap.

But not even that was good enough for Dante, because he began to hunger for something even more, to write a poem that would go beyond all of his vernacular predecessors by fusing all of these—seemingly—mutually exclusive goods into a harmonious unity. Is it possible to get the mathematical order of Bach and the melody of Mozart and the sweetness of Schubert and the transcendence of Palestrina all into the same piece? In any case, something like that is what Dante wanted to do: he wanted to write what I call—in all caps—“The Perfect Poem,” a poem that described Beatrice’s beauty so perfectly that it would communicate a religious experience to all who read it, even if they had not even seen Beatrice themselves.

But Dante still didn’t know how to accomplish that. And so, what did he do? He wrote a poem about how he wanted to write a poem which he didn’t yet know how to write. The poem, as it turns out, was probably one of Dante’s three personal favorite poems, “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.” He says that he was going for a walk by a very beautiful stream when all of a sudden an intense desire to write a poem came into his heart, and after that a line sort of magically appeared in his heard: “donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.” And in this poem we hear him describe for himself the goal for his art:

Ladies who have intelligence of love,
I wish to speak to you about my lady...

I tell you, when I think of her perfection,
Love lets me feel the sweetness of his presence, and if at that point I could still feel bold,
my words could make all mankind fall in love...

for where she goes Love drives a killing frost into vile hearts
that freezes and destroys what they are thinking; should such a one insist on looking at her,
he is changed to something noble or he dies.
And if she finds one worthy to behold her,
that man will feel her power for salvation
when she accords to him her salutation,
which humbles him till he forgets all wrongs.

In other words, this future “The Perfect Poem,” would be such a perfect work of art that it would set the hearts of the noble on fire, give comfort to the just, convert sinners, and freeze the hearts of hardened sinners who had moved beyond repentance. Don’t you wish we had one of these? “The Perfect Poem” would be like Sam’s phial of light in the Lord of the Rings, would be like a pure crystal that could capture the beauty of Beatrice, and Dante could hold this poem up and let it glow, and it would shine, even in profoundest darkness.

But that’s a little anachronistic. Better to compare the poem to a medieval reliquary.

Free Image from Wikimedia Commons

In the medieval period, reliquaries were elaborately ornamented vessels to house the presumed miracle-working remains of the saints. And they were exuberant, elaborate, colorful, and multi-textured; almost gaudy by our sober standards. They were made of gold or silver, and often had set within them gems or precious mementos from the past, or even shells. We take our precious objects and stick them behind glass in museums. But the medievals took theirs and put them in these reliquary boxes, as external signs of the radical sacredness of what was held within. In a similar way, we could think of Dante’s poetry as the reliquary which houses the beauty of Beatrice. Indeed, the line between religion and literature in Dante is blurry, but Dante thought that exploring the secular experience of natural love could open up transcendent religious dimensions.

If you need one more image to think through all of this, take a look at the ceiling of Il Gesù, the great baroque mother church of the Jesuit order in Rome.

The Ceiling of Il Gesù in Rome (free image from Wikimedia)

On the ceiling, emblazoned in the pure white light, are the gold letters of the monogram of the name of Jesus: IHS.

Can you see them?

Gold on white is hard to see, and that’s on purpose, because it represents the brilliance that the Holy Name irradiates, like a spiritual explosion. And around the name of Jesus we find the wicked falling away, because in their darkened hearts and twisted minds it’s too painful for them to look upon it; but at the same time, those who hunger and thirst for the kingdom of heaven are attracted by it, pulled up, and find it sweet. Here is the beauty they’ve been hungering for their whole lives.

And in this way, Dante—so his plans went—would set the world on fire.

And yet, up to this point, Dante still didn’t know how to write “The Perfect Poem,” and this is when he had yet another spiritual dream, a second prophetic calling. Dante tells us that he was asleep one night when his soul woke up, left its body lying on the couch, and began to rise through the air, ascending past the moon, and then on upward, past Mercury and Venus, the Sun and Mars, and even Jupiter and Saturn, up into that realm of pure intellectual light—what we would call the realm of perfect quantum energy—and there he saw Beatrice, now gathered in glory with all the saints, whose bodies are made of intellectual light. Here’s how he himself put it at the end of Vita Nuova:

After I wrote this sonnet there came to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessed one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way. To achieve this I am striving as hard as I can, and this she truly knows. Accordingly, if it be the pleasure of Him through whom all things live that my life continue for a few more years, I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman. And then may it please the One who is the Lord of graciousness that my soul ascend to behold the glory of its lady, that is, of that blessed Beatrice, who in glory contemplates the countenance of the One qui est per omnia secula benedictus.

And, thus, Dante announced that he would dedicate himself to a period of intense study. He no longer wanted to make something just to make the Top Ten Charts. Rather, he knew he would have to lay a foundation: and so, he began to study the Old Masters. And now we’ve come full circle.

Back at the awards show, imagine, for a moment, that a trained musicologist were in the audience, listening to Swift’s speech. Imagine further that he was a professor at Michigan State and had a specialty in the music of Bach. He might think Taylor Swift’s goal laudable and her own conviction touching, but, privately, he wouldn’t think it practicable—not because of lack of training or knowledge, but because of the inherent limitations of the genre of popular music in which Swift sings. Even Bach couldn’t be Bach if the Elector of Saxony commissioned him to write a song called “You Belong with Me.” It’s not Swift. It’s the very generic limitations of the medium. At least, that’s what the college professor would think, and he might even say this with his friends, over wine, if they asked, or maybe even if they didn’t, but what we know for sure is that as he said these thing, he would be wearing a blazer, with elbow patches.

To be continued…