Emily Dickinson
American · 19th century
Reclusive American poet known for compressed, dashed verse exploring death, immortality, nature, and love. One of America's most original poetic voices.
Connection to Taylor Swift
A distant blood relation as well as a literary touchstone: in 2024 the genealogy service Ancestry established that Swift and Dickinson are sixth cousins three times removed, both descended from a seventeenth-century English settler of Windsor, Connecticut. Swift has long signalled her affinity for the poet, announcing evermore on Dickinson's birthday, and Dickinson's compressed, death-haunted voice sits behind several evermore-era songs. It surfaces most directly in ivy, where Dickinson and her contested intimacy with Susan Gilbert form one of the song's invited readings.
Notable Works
- Because I could not stop for Death, I heard a Fly buzz when I died
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Wild nights - Wild nights!
“Wild winds are death to the candle”
Angela & Uncle Jerry note the 'wild winds' line also echoes Emily Dickinson's poem 'Wild Nights - Wild Nights!' (poem number 269). Uncle Jerry suggests listeners look at the Dickinson poem for a comparative reading.
Heart! We will forget him!
Uncle Jerry reads Emily Dickinson's poem number 47 in full and asks Angela 'Tell me if this sounds like Taylor.' He describes it as a conversation between the speaker and her heart about forgetting a former lover, the same emotional territory as Cold as You. Angela & Uncle Jerry agree the concept of love and loss 'just doesn't change throughout time.'
I held a Jewel in my fingers
“And now that I'm sitting here thinking it through / I've never been anywhere cold as you”
Uncle Jerry reads Emily Dickinson's poem number 245 and calls it his favorite. He connects the 'amethyst remembrance', the memory of a perfect thing now lost, directly to Cold as You's central emotion: 'she remembers that she's never been anywhere as cold as him. And that's the sadness of it.' Angela & Uncle Jerry explicitly connect the Dickinson poem's theme of lost love reduced to memory with Cold as You's reflective sadness.
Because I could not stop for Death
“My house of stone, your ivy grows”
Angela & Uncle Jerry draw a significant connection between ivy and Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death.' Uncle Jerry quotes the poem's penultimate verse describing a 'house that seemed a swelling of the ground', a grave, and connects it to ivy's 'my house of stone.' Both works feature a speaker who is dead or in a liminal death state, a visitor who comes to the grave, and the imagery of stone as tombstone. Uncle Jerry notes this is a very famous Dickinson poem that Taylor likely read in high school.
Poem #14
Angela & Uncle Jerry read Emily Dickinson's Poem #14, which describes Dickinson's relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who lived just a 'hedge away.' Uncle Jerry quotes the poem and connects it to the sapphic love affair interpretation of ivy, two women in an intimate, possibly romantic relationship, one of whom is married to the other's brother.