Turns out, Taylor Swift has been in her “tortured poet” era all along. Swfties recently learned that the “Anti-Hero” singer shares DNA with the original chairman of the tortured poets department.
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Taylor Swift Is Related to Who?
Genealogy website Ancestry.com revealed today (March 4) in an Instagram post that Swift and Emily Dickinson are distant relatives. Specifically, they are sixth cousins, three times removed.
“We need to calm down…but how can we when we have BIG news!?” the website wrote in its Instagram caption.
The two writers share a common ancestor: a 17-century English immigrant who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut. The man was Swift’s ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth.
“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,” the website told Today.
“I Gave So Many Signs:” All the Parallels Between Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson
Unlike her distant relative, Dickinson’s success came posthumously. The Amherst, Massachusetts native never married, living and dying in virtual isolation.
After her death in 1886, the poet’s younger sister became obsessed with seeing her work published. Now, Dickinson is one of America’s most celebrated poets of all time, known for poems such as “Hope is the thing with feathers” and “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
That’s where the major differences end. Both women are famous for imbuing everyday objects with a special kind of magic — a favorite scarf forgotten in an ex-lover’s drawer; a patch of sunlight on a frigid winter’s day. Truly, how did we not see this all along?
Actually, some of us did. The 14-time GRAMMY winner released her 2020 surprise album evermore Dec. 10, 2020 — which, a particularly perceptive Swiftie pointed out, would have been Dickinson’s 190th birthday.
What’s more, the “Eras Tour” phenomenon, 34, explicitly referenced Dickinson during her 2022 acceptance speech for the songwriter-artist of the decade award from Nashville Songwriters Assn. International.
“I categorize certain songs of mine in the Quill style if the words and phrasings are antiquated, if I was inspired to write it after reading Charlotte Brontë or after watching a movie where everyone is wearing poet shirts and corsets,” Swift said. “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.”
Nearly every track on Swift’s 2020 sister albums, folklore and evermore, fall into the Quill genre. “so Emily Dickinson possessed during the writing folklore and evermore, then abandoned her during the writing of midnights,” one fan wrote on X/Twitter.
We’ll learn April 19 if Dickinson’s spirit resurfaced during the making of The Tortured Poets Department.
Featured image by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
