I completely agree, o Bottomfish. I often find Dickinson's poems very comforting, and not alienating at all. I feel like part of that "we," and recognize this experience. Some of her poems seem to be written from a highly personal and idiosyncratic perspective, but also somehow "for" all of us. It may be in fact that we readers in the 21st century are closer to her than those who surrounded her: there is a lot of literature on the world she lived in, and how she interacted with it, but suffice to say obviously she was different from most of her community, and those differences were magnified by the particularities of her personality.