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Taylor Swift performs on March 2nd.
CNN –
Turns out Taylor Swift was spot on when she named her upcoming album The Tortured Poets Department.
The company Ancestry, which helps people track their genealogy, has found evidence that Swift is distantly related to famous poet Emily Dickinson.
“We need to calm down… but how can we when we have BIG news?” reads a post on the Ancestry Instagram account. “Acclaimed American poets Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson are sixth cousins, three times removed.”
CNN has reached out to Swift's rep for comment. The news was first announced on NBC's “Today.”
Dickinson, who lived from 1830 to 1886, is known for her poems such as “Because I Couldn't Stop Before Death” and “'Hope' is the Thing with Feathers.”
The writer was a celebrity in her time – and like her distant cousin, she even wrote about fame. “Success is viewed sweetest / By those who never succeed / To understand a nectar / Requires the greatest need,” Dickinson wrote in her poem. “Success is viewed in the sweetest way.”
“Swift and Dickinson are both descended 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),” according to Ancestry.
Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The American poet Emily Dickinson in a portrait from around 1850.
Swifties have long made the connection between the two women.
Her album “Evermore” was announced on December 10, 2020, the day of Dickinson’s birthday. Some believe the title was inspired by Dickinson's poem “One Sister Have I in Our House,” which contains the word “forevermore.”
Two years after that announcement, Swift referenced the legendary writer in her acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriters Association International's songwriter-artist of the decade award.
Swift explained that the lyrics she writes fall into three genre categories: feather pen lyrics, fountain pen lyrics, and glitter gel pen lyrics, which relate to the writing instrument she assumes she used when composing the texts in his hand.
“If my lyrics sound like a letter written by Emily Dickinson's great-grandmother while sewing a lace curtain, then I'm writing in the quill genre,” Swift said, noting that her single “Ivy” from “Evermore” would fall into that category.
Welcome to Swift's historical era.