Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, comes out Friday. So this hour, we are taking a look at the idea of the actual tortured poet. We talk about where the idea of tortured poets came from, learn about the nature of creativity, and hear from a poet about where their inspiration comes from.

GUESTS: 

• Roland Greene: Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Center at Stanford University. He is editor in chief of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. His newest book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes 
• James C. Kaufman: Professor of Educational Psychology at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books, including The Creativity Advantage and The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity
• Sandra Simonds: Writer, professor, and author of eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Triptychs. She is also the author of the novel Assia

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Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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