Taylor Swift will no doubt love being compared to Sylvia Plath. Especially when the comparison comes from Maggie Nelson, one of the greatest living non-fiction writers and author of the it-girl philosophical memoir, The Argonauts. Because, of course, Swift is a self-professed tortured poet: a woman who stacks literary references like chord progressions, no bard too sacred, no play or fictional character too obvious to include in a song. This is the woman who put on an auburn wig and signed a copy of her imaginary debut novel All Too Well in the video of the same name.
Despite how she aligns with the literary, there’s little that meaningfully connects Swift to Plath – least of all in their work – beyond the fact that both are (or were, in Plath’s case) industrious female artists who wanted to be famous and then became icons. Which is reason enough, I guess, for Nelson’s new essay-length book, The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, to make a mostly weak case that they are cultural sisters.
