The Pioneer Valley’s most famous poet, it turns out, has a genealogical connection to the the modern world’s most famous singer-songwriter.

In a segment on NBC’s “Today Show” on Monday, the genealogy website Ancestry.com revealed that Emily Dickinson and Taylor Swift are sixth cousins, three times removed, having both directly descended from a 17th-century English settler named Jonathan Gillette, who was Swift’s ninth-great-grandfather and Dickinson’s sixth-great-grandfather.

Swift, who began as a country music artist before switching to a pop-oriented sound, is known for writing her own songs and in recent years has released albums that have a decidedly more folk inspiration, with her ninth album “Evermore” believed to be named after a line in a Dickinson poem. Swift has cited Dickinson as an influence on some of her recent songwriting, and her coming album is titled “The Tortured Poets Department,” which may also be a nod to Dickinson.

A recent Apple TV series about Dickinson’s life, starring the actress Hailee Steinfeld, also featured a Taylor Swift song, “Ivy,” as part of its soundtrack.

“Emily Dickinson has been particularly resonant these past few years and her legacy continues to inspire contemporary artists around the world,” said Patrick Fecher, a spokesperson for the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, the site of the poet’s lifelong home. “We are delighted that Taylor Swift holds Emily Dickinson in such high regard and hope she will visit the place Dickinson called home whenever she is ready.”

The museum posted about the news on its Instagram page, saying it was “time to plan your visit to the museum.”

The two women share other similarities as well. They have nearly identical birthdays, with Dickinson born on Dec. 10 and Swift on Dec. 13. Dickinson’s poems, much of them published posthumously, were heavily edited by others before appearing in print, with their original intended versions not published until decades later.

Swift, meanwhile, after a dispute with her former record label over the rights to her music catalog, re-recorded her first six albums, released as “Taylor’s Version” of the songs.

Furthermore, a textual analysis of the two artists works reveal a few similar themes explored by both Swift and Dickinson. Both appear to use sunny skies as a common motif — the words “summer,” “sun,” “sunshine,” and “sunrise” appear often times in the lyrics of both artists. Another common theme is the act of seeing or being seen: words like “eye,” and different verb conjugations of “look” and “see” dot their compositions. Lastly, both express spirituality in their works, with terms like “God,” “faith,” and “heaven” repeated throughout.

Of course, there are also several key differences: Swift is a globe-trotting superstar who regularly fills arenas with fans, while Dickinson was known as an introvert who rarely traveled much further than her hometown of Amherst.

Swift has also had many highly publicized relationships with other celebrities, including her current boyfriend and NFL player Travis Kelce, while Dickinson never publicly discussed her romantic life, which has been the subject of speculation among scholars of her work (many now believe she had a romantic relationship with her brother Austin’s wife, Susan Gilbert).

In 2022 at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, Swift said she wrote three types of songs, categorizing by the type of pen one might use to write them — fountain pen, glitter gel and quill. In discussing the latter type of songs, she directly invoked Dickinson.

“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,” she said.

Alexander MacDougall can be reached at amacdougall@gazettenet.com.