Emily Dickinson once said that her way of looking at things was “New Englandly.” The expression has often provided her readers and critics with both a wedge into her sometimes gnomic poems and a check against their occasional temptations to fly off into interpretative fancy. What seeing “New Englandly” entailed, however, was never explained by the poet. For most readers it has come to mean in the broadest sense that her work should be interpreted in the context of and as part of New England's intellectual, religious, and literary history. But Ne England also has a social and cultural history, and it is of course only logical that Emily Dickinson should have her own place in that history, albeit an original one.