Taylor Swift has a gift for lyricism, and it looks like it’s all in the family. The record-breaking songstress is a distant relative of another renowned American wordsmith: Emily Dickinson, the Today showrevealed. “Swift and Dickinson both descend from a 17th century English immigrant (Swift’s 9th great-grandfather and Dickinson’s 6th great-grandfather who was an early settler of Windsor, Connecticut),” the genealogy company Ancestry explained, making them sixth cousins, three times removed. The singer has never publicly confirmed the relationship, but she’s hinted—in typical Taylor fashion—at a connection to the poet for years, name-dropping her in an acceptance speech in 2022. Some Swifties theorize that the 19th century poet inspired Swift’s 2020 album evermore, because it frequently features the phrase “forevermore,” which is in one of Dickinson’s poems, and because Swift announced it on Dickinson’s birthday. In an interview discussing the album art for her other 2020 album, folklore, Swift explained that she had a vision of “this girl sleepwalking through the forest in a nightgown in 1830” — the exact year that Dickinson was born.
