Pop sensation Taylor Swift has an unexpected connection to literary history: she is connected to Emily Dickinson, a famous nineteenth-century poet.
On Monday, heritage.com (a genealogy company) told NBC’s Today that Swift and Dickinson share heritage, tracing their ancestors back to a 17th-century English immigrant (Jonathan Gillette) who settled in Windsor, Connecticut. This ancestor is Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather, making the two individuals sixth cousins, three times removed.
This family link is appropriate, as Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is set to be released on April 19. Speaking of her long-dead, distant relative, Dickinson, a pioneer in American poetry, left an indelible impression despite releasing only a portion of her huge body of work during her lifetime—10 poems and one letter out of approximately 1,800. Her lyrics explored themes such as death, immortality, society, and spirituality.
Ancestry’s investigation revealed that Swift’s family lived in Connecticut for six generations before relocating to north-western Pennsylvania and marrying into the Swift bloodline. Interestingly, Swift had previously mentioned the poet.
In 2022, when she received the Nashville Songwriters Association International’s Songwriter-Artist of the Decade award, she joked, “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.”
Swifties, ever the sharp detectives, discovered a link between Swift and Dickinson around the release of the singer’s ninth studio album, Evermore. The album was released on Dickinson’s birthday, December 10. Swift is now on the Asian leg of her hugely successful Eras tour.
While Dickinson struggled to find popularity throughout her life, Swift has achieved enormous success. In February, she earned an incredible fourth Album of the Year Grammy, surpassing superstars such as Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, and Stevie Wonder.
Taylor Swift’s concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour grossed $261.6 million worldwide and is the 11th highest-grossing film of 2023 in the United States.
TIME magazine named Swift Person of the Year for 2023, and she was a significant feature of the 2024 Super Bowl.
