W. Clark Gilpin explores the poetry of one of nineteenth-century America's greatest writers. He examines how Evangelical Protestantism shaped Emily Dickinson's worldview and also how Dickinson's poetry illuminates the religious dimension of the surrounding culture. In particular, the volume reviews the religious practices, literature, architecture and ideas that were an inescapable feature of the Dickinson family's everyday life in Amherst. The study also analyses how religion shaped the habits of thought, styles of expression and even daily routines of Dickinson's life. Here, Gilpin recovers how religious presuppositions affected the patterns of nineteenth-century New England social life, including, for example, the prevailing normative assumptions about gender roles. Yet religion did more than shape Dickinson and the culture around her. Through her poetry, as Dickinson famously put it, she proposed to ‘tell all the truth, but tell it slant’ (p. 8). At this level, Gilpin uncovers how Dickinson gave poetic expression to her religious thought and in this way she shaped religion. Two chapters explore how Dickinson reconfigured the classic Christian practice of solitude through reading, meditation and writing, all prominent ingredients of Christian devotion in New England since it was first colonised. The final two chapters examine how classic ideas of heaven, immortality and eternity empowered Dickinson to interpret experiential problems of mourning, desire and the transient nature of human life. Although not a biography in the traditional sense, the study does provide a useful introduction to Dickinson's life. More importantly, it uses Dickinson's poetry as a window into the religious thought, practice and imagination of nineteenth-century American Protestantism. This eloquently written volume provides a valuable resource for students of nineteenth-century American literature, religion and culture.