I'm Christopher Leiden and this is open source going to school on Taylor Swift in the Harvard

course and all we know is as her song says we're enchanted to meet her. And it was enchanting to meet you.

Taylor Swift comes out of literature, but she's more than a poet or a pop star.

Maybe the word is enchanter for the artist who gets it all into a song

who knows the fusion power of sharp words with the right minimum of melody.

We're anticipating Taylor Swift's next album,

her tortured poets department coming in April.

Stephanie Bert and M.J. Kunif have made a hit course of it all

for Harvard undergraduates.

Professor Bert, you're well known as a critical gateway to contemporary poetry, and you know your songwriters as well.

If you are Taylor Swift or Joni Mitchell or Prince or Stephen Sondheim, you are writing words to be sung,

words that achieve their full emotional and aesthetic effect, when they've got a melody and music behind them.

That's what songwriting is.

It goes back quite far, but that's where we are now. Right now it is really separate from page-based poetry and from novel writing.

I think I've been in awe of songwriting all my life.

Oh, me too. George and Ira Gershwin. I mean, Ira, we don't call him an American poet exactly.

We call him a great lyricist because he wrote great lyrics.

And we call Frank Lesser, maybe the best of them all.

Maybe it's cold outside, Cole Porter for kind of loud.

But what is it that makes a person a lyricist?

Do we know, MJ?

I think that probably depends on the songwriter. I think for Taylor Swift one of the things that we keep coming back to in the class and that I think both Steph and I come back to as people is the

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