How do I write a poem for a statue?
That was the question Emma Lazarus posed in 1882, when she was asked to donate an original work to help raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
Her first response was no, despite her own immigrant story: The Lazarus family traced its roots to pre-Revolutionary War New Amsterdam, New York, where they were among the first 23 Portuguese Jews to arrive after fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.
By the time Emma was born in 1849, New York was home. Her father, a wealthy merchant and sugar refiner, hired private tutors to educate Emma and her six brothers and sisters. A student of American and European literature who also spoke several languages, Emma published several German translations before she completed her first poetry collection in 1871. A second collection followed, then a novel, and a play in verse.
In 1881, after learning about the persecution Russian Jews suffered after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Emma began to explore her Jewish identity in her work. In 1882 she published Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems, one of the first literary works to explore what it means to be Jewish in America.
But it was her advocacy on behalf of Jewish refugees that prompted the ask for a poem about Lady Liberty. It took some convincing, but Emma finally agreed to donate a sonnet, “The New Colossus,” in part because of the promise the statue represented to immigrants.
By the time the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on Oct. 28, 1886, Emma’s poem was long forgotten. It wasn’t read at the dedication, nor was it considered a valuable fundraising item, bringing only $1,500 at auction as part of a package that included renderings of the statue.
Emma’s friend Georgina Schuyler resurrected the poem as a tribute to Emma, who died on Nov. 19, 1887 from Hodgkins lymphoma. In 1903 Schuyler and a group of friends created a bronze tablet with text from the sonnet that was mounted inside the statue’s pedestal. It remained there until 1986, when it was relocated to the Statue of Liberty Museum.
“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” These lines made Emma Lazarus famous but in many ways limited her reputation as a literary figure.
Visit Liberty Island now, and you’ll notice a group of five statues on the western end of the island. Four of them are men — the other is Emma Lazarus, whose sonnet almost wasn’t written and almost was forgotten, but whose verse captures the welcoming promise the Statue of Liberty represents.