Taylor Swift is distantly related to Emily Dickinson, a poet the pop icon is thought to have long admired, according to genealogy website Ancestry, which announced the news on Instagram, stating that Swift and Dickinson are sixth cousins, three times removed.
Their roots have been traced to the same 17th-century English immigrant — Swift's ninth great-grandfather and Dickinson's sixth great-grandfather. Their shared relative was 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 northwestern Pennsylvania, where they married into the Swift family line," Ancestry told Today.
Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania.
The singer has publicly referenced the 19th-century poet when discussing the lyrics she writes for her songs.
"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," she said in 2022 while receiving the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, according to Today.
Further, Swift's ninth album, "Evermore," was released on Dec. 10, 2020, which coincides with Dickinson's birthday.
Shortly before announcing the release of the album, Swift spoke about the cover of her album "Folklore," revealing to Entertainment Weekly her concept of "this girl sleepwalking through the forest in a nightgown in 1830," the year Dickinson was born.
Earlier this year, Swift admitted that she felt "lonely" working on "Folklore" while quarantining with actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend at the time.
She opened up about her emotional state during the COVID-19 pandemic halfway through her Eras Tour stop at Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia, last month.
"[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill. That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing 'Folklore,'" she said in a fan-captured video.
"And I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill. That was in my mind, what I thought I looked like writing Folklore."
The Grammy winner added: "So that's all that matters — the delusion."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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