Taylor Swift is distant cousin of US poet Emily Dickinson
TAYLOR SWIFT once cited Emily Dickinson as an inspiration but it turns out the great American poet is also a distant relation of the pop superstar.
The pair are sixth cousins, three times removed, according to Ancestry, the genealogy company, which says that they “both descend from a 17th-century English immigrant, Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth great-grandfather, an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut”.
“Taylor 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,” Ancestry said in a statement to the NBC show Today.
Swift publicly referenced the 19th-century poet in 2022 while talking about the different types of lyrics she writes for her songs. “If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson’s greatgrandmother while sewing a lace curtain, that’s me writing in the Quill genre,” she said after receiving an award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International.
Fans of the musician, 34, have also speculated whether Swift’s ninth studio album, was inspired by the works of Dickinson, regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. She announced the album’s release on Dec 10 2020, exactly 190 years after Dickinson’s birth in Amherst, Massachusetts. Ancestry has previously revealed a family connection between other figures of American popular culture. In 2019, it found that Tom Hanks was related to the late children’s TV host Fred Rogers, who the actor played in the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.