📜 The Tortured Poets Department (Sad Girl University) – Overthinking in Iambic Pentameter

Swiftie 3.0 – Advanced Level

This is literally Taylor Swift in her “BA in English / minor in delusion” phase. Every song is giving emotional dissertation, melodrama in MLA format, and painful poetry you post at 2AM then delete by 2:01. Ideal for high-level learners who want to unpack language that’s equal parts artsy, self-aware, and devastatingly extra.

Think: satire, sorrow, and self-roasting—all wrapped in baroque sentence structures and lyrical subtweets.

🎯 Language Focus

• Grammar & Style: Parallel structure, polysyllabic vocabulary, rhetorical devices

• Vocabulary: Obsession, heartbreak, satire, art references, highbrow vs lowbrow language

• Functions: Expressing grief, irony, sarcasm, emotional intelligence

• Theme: Loss, ego, literary angst, pop culture dissociation

✏️ Key Lyrics for the Classroom

1. “Fortnight” (feat. Post Malone)
🕰 “I love you, it’s ruining my life.”

• Simple sentence, big emotional payoff—great for tone analysis

• Teach juxtaposition, hyperbole, and emotive impact of brevity

2. “The Tortured Poets Department”
✍️ “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate…”

• Explore stream-of-detail narrative, run-on storytelling, and emotional build-up

• Discuss imagery, listing, and intimate absurdity

3. “So Long, London”
🌫 “I stopped CPR, after all, it’s no use.”

• Metaphor of love as life support—practice symbolism and emotional detachment language

• Useful for passive voice + finality expressions

4. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”
💔 “I’m miserable, and nobody even knows!”

• Teaches sarcasm, ironic tone, and masked emotional cues

• Contrast between surface language and inner emotion

5. “Clara Bow”
🌟 “You look like Clara Bow… in this light, you’re Marilyn.”

• Use for historical cultural references, comparative structures, and identity projections

🧠 Classroom Ideas

• Sad Girl Sentence Surgery: Break down the most dramatic lyric and rebuild it in academic, sarcastic, or Gen Z speak

• Tone Tier List: Rank lyrics from “melancholic poetry” to “petty icon” and justify language choice

• Literary Allusions 101: Have students research and present the cultural references in the album (Clara Bow, Dylan Thomas, etc.)

• Heartbreak Haikus: Write micro-poems using lyrical inspiration and poetic constraints

🤯 Why This Album Works

TTPD is basically AP English with a breakdown filter. It gives students a chance to explore how language, tone, and references can flex from deeply moving to hilariously self-aware—all within the same verse. Ideal for advanced learners craving complexity, emotional vocabulary, and literary flair.

This ain’t just learning English. It’s serving Sad Protagonist Core™.

That’s a wrap on the Speak Swiftly curriculum.
You’ve laughed. You’ve cried. You’ve learned how to teach phrasal verbs with Karma and figurative speech with Champagne Problems.
And to that we say…

“Long Live”