Emma Lazarus wrote the first prose poem in English

Person: Emma Lazarus
Lived: 1849–1887
Field: Poetry
From: American

The story

Emma Lazarus was one of the most versatile American poets of the nineteenth century. The Jewish Women's Archive notes that she wrote in a wide variety of verse forms, from sonnets such as "The New Colossus" and lyric poems to long mythic narratives, translations and verse dramas such as The Spagnoletto and The Dance to Death. In the 1880s Jewish history became one of her central themes.

Late in her short life she tried something new. "By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose" appeared in March 1887 and was her last published work. Its subject is the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the community from which her own Sephardic ancestors descended. Lazarus had already linked that expulsion to the refugees of her own day in "1492", a companion sonnet written within days of "The New Colossus".

Instead of verse lines and rhyme, it is written as a sequence of short pieces of poetic prose, and the Jewish Women's Archive states that with it she composed the first prose poem in English. Wikipedia records that the sequence was considered her strongest claim to a foremost place in American literature. A small collection, Poems in Prose, appeared the same year and was her last book.

Lazarus wrote these pieces while seriously ill. She spent May 1885 to September 1887 in Europe, travelling in England, France, Holland and Italy, and in the summer of 1886, suffering from lymphoma, she prepared her collected poems for publication after her death. She returned to New York gravely ill and died on 19 November 1887, aged 38. The Poems of Emma Lazarus followed in two volumes.

The prose poem has since become a familiar part of English-language poetry. That the first English example was a meditation on Jewish exile, written by an American Jewish woman, shows how Lazarus joined literary innovation with a deep sense of her people's history.

Why it matters

Lazarus opened a new form for English-language writers, and used it to give voice to the long history of Jewish exile.

About Emma Lazarus

New York poet of old Sephardic stock who championed Jewish refugees and wrote ‘The New Colossus’, the sonnet that made the Statue of Liberty a ‘Mother of Exiles’.

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Emma Lazarus

1849–1887 · Poetry

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