The hugely successful US singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is related to the renowned 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson, a genealogy company has revealed.  The link, reported in the Guardian, is according to Ancestry.com, who shared the news in an exclusive report with NBC’s Today.

The genealogy company said that Swift and Dickinson are both descended 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.

Dickinson and Swift are sixth cousins, three times removed. Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, lived as a recluse in her family’s home and only published anonymously while she was alive. The US Poetry Foundation describes her as “one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time”.

Swift has referred to the poet previously in public comments about her songwriting. In 2022, while accepting the Songwriter-Artist of the Decade award from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, she 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.”

The release date of Swift’s ninth studio album, Evermore – 10 December 2020 – was also Dickinson’s birthday. Swift’s new album due for release in April is titled The Tortured Poets Department.