The Treasury Department announced some time back they would be replacing Hamilton with a woman on the ten-dollar bill. Top choices, including Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt, are all very worthy.
Sadly for me, my first choice, the woman I thought best suited for currency enshrinement, rarely if ever has been named: Poet Emily Dickinson.
Here’s my reasoning: First of all, the New England poet already looks like money. Take a look at that one existent photo of her: She’s dry and serious, just like a sawbuck. She already looks like she went to a Halloween party dressed as money.
Secondly, let’s face it: America is moving more toward being a fully functioning poetic state —the first Iambic Pentameter-ocracy in the free world. I mark the beginning of this evolution to 1996 when Baltimore named its new football franchise after a poem by local poet E. A. Poe. The rhyming juggernaut continues to this day, when the former governor of Alaska endorsed a presidential candidate rhyme: “their failed agenda, it can’t be salvaged. It must be savaged,” she said.
Lastly, why Dickinson? She made her own case best when she wrote:
I gave myself to him,
And took himself for pay,
The solemn contract of a life,
Was ratified this way.
She finished this verse with:
The wealth might disappoint,
Myself a poorer prove,
Than this great purchaser suspect.
Join me in putting the bard of Amherst, this great purchaser, Emily Dickinson on the sawbuck where she belongs.
I’m Dan Libman, and that’s my perspective.
