Lazarus, Emma

(1849–87)

   US poetess. Emma Lazarus is remembered principally as the author of the sonnet ‘The New Colossus’ which is engraved upon the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour. The poem expresses her vision of America as a sanctuary for the ‘huddled masses’ of Europe, victims of religious and economic persecution.

   The daughter of a New York Sephardi family, she began writing poems and novels in her teens. Ralph Waldo Emerson took an interest in her work, and she developed a correspondence with Henry Longfellow that was to continue over the years. The pogroms in Russia in 1881–2. gave her a passionate interest in Jewish problems. She learned Hebrew and translated Judah HALEVI and other medieval Spanish-Jewish poets. Her volumes of poetry, such as Songs of a Semite (1882) and By the Waters of Babylon (1887), are filled with prophetic Zionist sentiment, and she urged her views in essays that appeared in contemporary American periodicals. It is ironical that at the request of her assimilated family, works with a Jewish content were omitted from a collected edition published two years after her death.