Biography and Autobiography

Poetry Sunday: The New Colossus

To consecrate the Fourth of July, here's this month's Poetry Sunday. American readers will credible recognize today's poem immediately, as well they should: it's engraved on a panel mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But what may not be as a great extent known are the freethought sympathies of the poet.

Emma Lazarus was born in 1849 in New York Urban district, the daughter of parents who were descended from generations of Sephardic Judaism. But according to the Jewish Accepted Library, "the Lazarus family relegated their Jewish scrupulous life to the formal, occasional expression that benefit manners required." Emma, the fourth of seven children, displayed dithyrambic talent from an early age, and her proud father published her first supply of poetry when she was sixteen. Her work attracted the notice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who befriended her and to whom she dedicated a later trade, Admetus and Other Poems.

It was nationality and heritage that moved Lazarus, not belief. After personally meeting some of the Jewish immigrants who fled to America after a series of murderous pogroms in Russia, she became a passionate advocate of the nascent Zionist migration. In books and letters, she argued that only the establishment of a Jewish homeland would put a conclusion to then-rampant anti-Semitism and persecution. But when a local rabbi invited her to use her melodic talent to contribute to a hymn book, she responded, "I will cheerfully assist you as far as I am able; but that will not be much. I shall always be loyal to my lineage, but I feel no religious fervor in my soul."

After a ephemeral but impassioned life, Emma Lazarus died in 1887 at the age of 38. The following ditty, her most famous work, was written in 1883 to relieve a fund-raising endeavor to build the support upon which the statue now sits. In the poem's title and beginning lines, she contrasts the Statue of Liberty against the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the Ogygian world, describing it as a monument to freedom rather than win. Her enduring conception of the Statue as a beacon shining out to oppressed and disenfranchised people everywhere has resounded through America's information and given voice to the ideals our country stands for. Though America has not always lived up to its founding guide of liberty, when we have honored this principle, we have given longing and courage to the downtrodden throughout the world.

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