Taylor Swift poses on the red carpet as she attends the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Calif. on Feb. 4.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
With the revelation, published first by NBC’s Today, that Taylor Swift and the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson are sixth cousins (thrice removed), comparisons between the two women are inevitable.
Both are poets, in a sense. Both are now comfortably two of the most famous American women to ever live. Both published their work in their own way, Taylor Swift by re-recording and re-releasing her first six albums to repossess them from her former label, and Emily Dickinson through her 40 handmade books of 1,100 poems that she kept locked away to be discovered only after her death. Just a handful of Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime (and not under her name). And yet, both used the technology of the day to cultivate a wider audience: Dickinson with letters to various writers and editors whom she’d ask to tell her whether her poetry was “alive”; Swift with her Instagram feed to her 283 million followers.
Emily Dickinson in an undated portrait courtesy of the Amherst College Library.The Associated Press
Both Swift and Dickinson, we now know, are descendants of 17th-century Connecticut man Jonathan Gillette, Ancestry.com told news site CT Insider. Will this newly discovered affiliation make Dickinson even more in vogue than she has been for the past one-and-a-half-ish centuries? The same way football player Travis Kelce’s star rose even higher thanks to his new relationship with Swift?
Die-hard Dickinson fans can hope, and to help, here’s a guide on how to get into Dickinson no matter how you like to show your fandom. Swifties, as Taylor’s fans are known, might want to study up ahead of her new album release on April 19. After all, it is called The Tortured Poets Department.
If you like biopics
You’re in luck. Wild Nights with Emily (2018), based on the private letters of Dickinson and the scholarship of the Professor Martha Nell Smith, makes the actress Molly Shannon into a funnier, hornier Dickinson than the one you were likely confronted with at school. Her relationship with her sister-in-law Susan (played by Susan Ziegler) is foregrounded, probably correctly, as a sexual one. There’s enough evidence in their surviving correspondence to make a credible claim of romance, but the make-out scenes had to be imagined out of thin air by writer and director Madeleine Olnek.
For a more sober accounting of Dickinson’s life, A Quiet Passion (2016) focuses more on the other ways Dickinson, played by Cynthia Nixon, flouted conventions and the traditions of being a well-bred woman: writing, refusing to observe her religion, confining herself to her room. While not quite the romp of Wild Nights with Emily (and a colleague did describe it as “slow”), A Quiet Passion was also well reviewed by the big critics.
If you like a binge
Then it’s Hailee Steinfeld as the eponymous character in Dickinson for you. The three seasons from AppleTV+, which ran from 2019 to 2021, employs time travel to make the poet a more modern character, at times in its plot and always in its music, which has Dickinson and friends dancing at one point to a song titled I Like Tuh by ILoveMakonnen and Carnage. (The show’s Instagram feed takes a line from Dickinson and turns it into what could be an opening line in a Tinder chat: “I’m nobody, who r u?”) The rapper Wiz Khalifa plays Death, aptly personifying the concept just as the poet did in one of her most famous poems, “Because I could not stop for Death –” (“He kindly stopped for me –”).
If you also need to do the dishes, walk the dog, etc.
Surprisingly, despite Dickinson’s poems being squarely in the public domain and her life story ripe for just this kind of over-analysis, there are no amazing podcasts dedicated to Emily. There’s a roundtable discussion of her life by scholars in one episode of BBC’s In Our Time, and another from The London Review of Books, as well as a few serialized readings of her poetry, none of which quite capture her work.
To this critic’s ear, the best audio work on Emily Dickinson is from the legendary Kitchen Sisters, two women who’ve been creating innovative and compelling audio journalism together for decades. Their episode, The Keepers: Emily Dickinson’s Hidden Kitchen, is part of a series on archivists, and takes us to a library at Harvard that stores a recipe for cake by Dickinson.
If you want to just, you know, read poetry
Collections of Emily Dickinson’s poems abound, as do biographies. The Essential Emily Dickinson starts with an introduction from another enigmatic and enchanting figure of literature, Joyce Carol Oates. The Poetry Foundation put a few dozen of her poems online, along with an extensive biographical and critical introduction. Modern editions preserve the idiosyncratic way that Dickinson used grammar and punctuation, following decades of editors normalizing her innovative form and sometimes creative spellings. Her manuscripts have been digitized, if you can decipher the cursive of 150 years ago.
If a list of just the top five Emily Dickinson poems (as judged by what I recall being her most famous work) will do:
“Because I could not stop for Death—”
“In this short life that only lasts an hour” (Are you sensing a theme here?)
“I started Early— Took my Dog— "
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—”
The last poem, Fame is a fickle food, is like much of Dickinson’s poetry, in that it’s short enough to print here in full, and timeless enough that we could imagine her speaking prophetically – and forebodingly – to our present day, or even to her famous sixth cousin, three times removed:
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die