- Person
- Emma Lazarus
- Lived
- 1849–1887
- Field
- Poetry
- From
- American
The story
Emma Lazarus was born in New York in 1849 into a wealthy family of Portuguese Sephardic descent whose roots in the city went back to colonial times. She became a respected poet, translator and essayist. In the early 1880s she also took up charitable work for refugees: on Ward's Island she worked as an aide to Jewish immigrants detained by Castle Garden immigration officials, and she was deeply moved by the Russian Jews fleeing persecution whom she met there.
In 1883 organisers of the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund", an art and literary auction to pay for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, asked writers to donate work. William Maxwell Evarts and the author Constance Cary Harrison approached Lazarus. Wikipedia records that she first declined, until Harrison persuaded her that the statue would mean a great deal to immigrants sailing into the harbour.
Lazarus had seen only the statue's torch, since the rest still lay in storage in Paris. Drawing on what she had witnessed of the immigrant's plight, she wrote the sonnet "The New Colossus", which the National Park Service dates to 2 November 1883. It was the first entry read at the exhibition's opening. The poem contrasts the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, a symbol of conquest, with a new figure: a "Mother of Exiles" who lifts her lamp to welcome the tired, the poor and the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free". The statue had been conceived to honour liberty and republican ideals; Lazarus gave it the mission of welcoming the stranger.
The sonnet appeared in the exhibition catalogue and in New York newspapers, but it soon faded and played no part in the statue's dedication in 1886. Lazarus died in 1887. In 1901 her friend Georgina Schuyler found the poem in a book and led a civic effort to honour it, and in 1903 the text was placed on a bronze plaque inside the statue's pedestal.
From the 1930s onward the poem was taken up by supporters of immigration. Irving Berlin set its closing lines to music, John F. Kennedy quoted it in A Nation of Immigrants, and the original manuscript is held by the American Jewish Historical Society. Today the plaque is displayed in the pedestal, a replica stands in the Statue of Liberty Museum, and the poem's words remain the best-known statement of America as a place of refuge.
Why it matters
Lazarus's words gave the Statue of Liberty its lasting meaning as a promise of refuge, and they are still quoted whenever nations debate how to welcome newcomers.
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’.
More about Emma Lazarus
- Emma Lazarus wrote the first prose poem in EnglishEmma Lazarus's "By the Waters of Babylon", about the exile of the Jews from Spain, is credited by the Jewish Women's Archive as the first prose poem in English.
- Lazarus's Heine translations are among the best in EnglishEmma Lazarus's 1881 book Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine contains renderings considered among the best English translations of the German Jewish poet.
Sources
- Emma Lazarus National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument
- The New Colossus Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.