Taylor Swift is linked to poet Emily Dickinson, according to Ancestry.com, which revealed the information in an exclusive revelation to NBC’s Today.
On Monday, the company’s genealogical department revealed that “Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant (Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut)” .
It appears that Swift’s ancestors “remained in Connecticut for six generations until her part of the family eventually settled in north-western Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line”.
Dickinson and Swift are sixth cousins at three times removed. Dickinson, who was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830, is recognized as one of America’s most famous poets. Dickinson lived as a recluse in her family’s house and published exclusively anonymously during her lifetime.
Notably, Swift has previously mentioned the poet in public discussions about her songs. In 2022, when accepting the Nashville Songwriters Association International’s Songwriter-Artist of the Decade award, she stated: “If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the quill genre.”
Fans have long associated Swift’s ninth studio album, Evermore, with Dickinson, noting that the album’s release date, December 10, 2020, was Dickinson’s birthday, among other lyrical references to the poet’s work.
Swift’s upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, is set to be released in April, thus the news of this relationship is timely. While Swift is presently on the Asia leg of her phenomenally successful Eras tour, she revealed during a February concert in Australia that writing her new album over the last two years reminded her “why songwriting is something that actually gets me through my life”.
