“Oh Sumptuous moment / Slower go”: Emily Dickinson’s Sapphic Wor(l)d-Making

Abstract

Abstract:This article centers Emily Dickinson’s imaginative and, at times, playful writing style—her word-making—to make legible her sapphic world-making in letters and poems to and about Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Through this wor(l) d-making, Dickinson taps into new modes of occupying time, creating a polyvalent present tense that holds in tension the grief of losing Susan to marriage and the ecstasy of reading and writing about pleasurable memories and anticipated reunions. Out of this tension emerge possibilities for a present experienced otherwise, lived aslant from both the past-oriented time of remembrance and mourning and the future-oriented time of the nation and its chronobiopolitical rhythms—both of which threaten to foreclose the continuation of Dickinson’s intimacies with Susan. Contemporary readers and critics have also found in the creative relationship to time that Dickinson cultivates through her sapphic wor(l) d-making the opportunity to reach across the centuries, immerse themselves in her writing, and momentarily slip into a different temporal order.