Guest Author - Linda Sue Grimes

Most Americans are acquainted with the lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Here is the entire sonnet, title “The New Colossus:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The writer of this famous sonnet is Emma Lazarus, who is probably most noted as the poet of the Statue of Liberty, sculpted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. France paid $400,000 for the statue, but the United State had to provide the pedestal which amounted to $270,000. Emma wrote the poem, “The New Colossus,” in 1883 to help raise money to build the pedestal. In 1903 sixteen years after her death, the poem was engraved on a plaque and placed on the pedestal of the Statue.

With this sonnet poet Emma Lazarus gave a tongue to a statue. And its description captured so well the sentiment of the United States as a land of freedom and opportunity that the poem has been loved and respected since it was first placed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Born to Moses and Esther Lazarus in 1849 in New York, Emma Lazarus published Poems and Translations Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen, her first book of poems, at age seventeen. Her father arranged for her book’s publication after having noticed his daughter’s extraordinary gift as a poet and translator. Her sister Josephine also became a writer and appeared as a featured speaker at the 1893 Jewish Women’s Congress.

Not shy about promoting herself, Emma sent Ralph Waldo Emerson a copy of her book. Emerson offered her comments and criticism, and Emma got the impression that he valued her work more than he did; she expected that he would include some of her poems in his anthology Parnassus in1874 but was disappointed to find that he had not. She wrote him a letter scolding him for the omission, but apparently he did not respond to it. She continued to admire him and seek his guidance, but the friendship seemed to mean more to her than to him.

Emma’s second book of poetry, Admetus and Other Poems, appeared in 1871 and met with approval of the critics. The Illustrated London New hailed her as “a poet of rare original power.” The rest of the decade saw her publishing as many as fifty poems in widely read journals. Her best reviews came for her translations of Heinrich Heine in 1881, after she published Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine.

Emma died at thirty-eight leaving behind a rich legacy of poetry, translations, and essays. She is recognized as the first noted Jewish writer in American literary history. She is also noted as a forerunner of the Zionist movement.

For more information about Emma Lazarus, please visit the following sites:

Emma Lazarus from Jewish Virtual Library
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/lazarus.html

Emma Lazarus from The Library Shelf
http://www.boloji.com/literature/00104.htm

The Emma Lazarus Fund
http://www.soros.org/emma/html/emma_.html

Selected Poetry of Emma Lazarus
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet378.html

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Books by Linda Sue Grimes:
Jiggery-Jee's Eden Valley Stories
Singing in the Silence: Poems of Faith
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