In tribute to singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s new album, Dixe Wills looks at six troubled talents who found solace in Britain’s soaring landscapes
Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die I don’t belong, and my beloved, neither do you Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry I’m setting off, but not without my muse…
So wrote global phenomenon Taylor Swift (inset) about the Lake District, an area she got to know during her six-year relationship with the English actor Joe Alwyn.
With her 11th studio album titled The Tortured Poets Department, the musician appears ready to unleash more songs about anguished versifiers. The early signs look promising: one of the bonus tracks is titled ‘The Albatross’, which must surely be a meditation on the misused seabird in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
Though it’s not historically accurate to say that all the poets went to the Lake District to die, as Swift avers (though if you can't take poetic licence when writing about poets, when can you?), Britain has certainly had its fair share of tortured bards. Many have struggled with depression, grief, alcoholism, drug addiction or mental illness. For some, their torture has provided the manure out of which their art has blossomed, while for others, their affliction has been truly debilitating or even fatal.
Of course, given the autobiographical nature of many of Swift’s songs, the album title could simply be making reference to Alwyn, with whom she parted ways in 2023. The actor happens to be in a WhatsApp group with fellow thespians Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, called ‘The tortured man club’.
But if the new release is indeed a paean to tortured poets, here are half a dozen from around Britain who would very much fit the bill. Five are well-known, while one, Violet Jacob, is long overdue her place in the pantheon of tormented greats.
John Clare
John Clare (1793–1864) was a rare thing in
