![]() ![]() It did, but it may have pigeonholed her in the process. Young notes that Lazarus placed it first in the manuscript she assembled prior to her death, as if knowing the sonnet could make her reputation. It has also given its author lasting fame. Later that year, poet James Russell Lowell wrote to Lazarus: “Your sonnet gives its subject a raison d’etre.” ![]() “The New Colossus” was, according to Lazarus biographer Bette Roth Young, “the only entry read at the gala opening” of the fundraising exhibition that had solicited art and literary works for auction. The poem’s early audiences sensed the power of the reinterpretation. To honor Bartholdi’s more peaceful representation, Lazarus stressed a different aspect of freedom: not the courage to fight the enemy but the willingness to accept the stranger. Its subject is the Roman goddess Libertas, familiar from the Eugène Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which she carries a battle flag and gun. The full title of Bartholdi’s statue is Liberty Enlightening the World. When asked to contribute a poem to a fundraiser for a statue-in-progress, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi for installation at New York Harbor, Lazarus took what proved to be a frutiful approach to public poetry: quietly investing her subject with her personal experience and concerns.Īs first conceived by the artist, Lady Liberty represented, simply, liberty. Around the same time, George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda (1876), which explores proto-Zionist themes, had deepened her interest in her own Jewish heritage. Within this tense climate, Emma Lazarus, a writer and activist from an affluent New York family, had begun volunteering to assist struggling exiles from Czarist Russia. At the time of its writing in 1883, European immigrants-including Italians, Greeks, and Russian-Jewish refugees-were arriving en masse in America, stirring fierce debate and frequent hostility among “natives” (as U.S.-born descendants of earlier European immigrants called themselves). ![]() It is an Italian sonnet composed by a Jewish-American woman, contrasting an ancient Greek statue with a statue built in modern France. Lacking the force of law, yet permanently fixed in American civic culture, “The New Colossus” has carved out a literary niche all its own: it is a credo, a gesture of “world-wide welcome,” and a magnet for controversy.Īs many commentators have noted, the poem is pluralistic in its roots. By now the pairing of sonnet and monument seems inevitable the one has redefined the other. It has managed this feat despite its author’s low profile during her lifetime, and despite having nearly lapsed into oblivion before its enshrinement. Is any poem more of a public institution than “ The New Colossus”? Since 1903, when it was first displayed on a plaque inside the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’s signature sonnet has become one of the most renowned and quoted poems on the planet. ![]()
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