Ancestry Reveals Taylor Swift Is Related to Late Poet Emily Dickinson
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It’s official — Taylor Swift and renowned poet Emily Dickinson are related.
After fans speculated the pop star may have a family tie to the late, great American poet — who died at age 55 in 1886 — Today revealed on Monday, March 4, that the duo are sixth cousins, three times removed.
“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),” Ancestry.com told the publication.
Ancestry continued, “Taylor Swift’s ancestors remained in Connecticut for six generations until her part of the family eventually settled in northwestern Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line.”
Fans started theorizing that Swift, 34, could be related to Dickinson in 2020 when she announced her ninth studio album, Evermore, on the poet’s birthday, December 10.
After the album dropped the following day, listeners connected Swift’s song “Ivy” to Dickinson’s love letters to her late sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson, who died at age 82 in 1913.
Emily’s poem, One Sister have I in our house, includes the stanza, “I spilt the dew / But took the morn / I chose this single star / From out the wide night’s numbers / Sue – forevermore!”
Similarly, Swift’s “Ivy” references spirits, leading fans to believe it was written from Sue’s perspective.
Evermore was again connected to Emily’s poem when Swift sang, “I had a feeling so peculiar / That this pain would be for evermore” in the song “Evermore,” which reminded fans of Emily’s “forevermore” line.
In 2022, fans began connecting the two’s family history via social media. “SHE’S RELATED TO EMILY DICKINSON omg,” one noted on a TikTok of their family trees. “Woahhh seriously?!!? Is this reaaaal?!? 🤯,” another wrote, with a third social media user gushing, “This is probably the best swifty tok I've ever seen.”
Swift previously opened up about Folklore, Evermore’s sister album, in a December 2020 interview with Entertainment Weekly, in which she seemingly connected her work to Emily’s. “I had this idea for the [Folklore album cover] that it would be this girl sleepwalking through the forest in a nightgown in 1830,” she said.
Fittingly, 1830 is the year Emily was born.
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While Swift has yet to comment on her relation to the poet, she has referenced Emily while accepting the Nashville Songwriters Association International award for Songwriter-Artist of the Decade in 2022.
“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,” Swift quipped.
