Liberty is one resource we never must run out of : we must always be certain that there is enough to go around and that we offer it to those who need it. Her poem “The New Colossus,” the most famous lines of which are “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” became the verbal embodiment of the Statue of Liberty, one intent of which was a mark of solidarity between France and the U.S. She also spoke out and wrote against anti-Semitism, in favor of a Zionist solution to the rampant persecution of Jews, and against persecution of immigrants here in the U.S. Lazarus was active with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. 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. within the pedestal on which the statue stands. In the 1880s there were waves of pogroms plaguing Jews in Eastern Europe, and Ms. A poem by Emma Lazarus is graven on a tablet. And she also was no stranger to the plight both of emigrants from dangerous countries and of immigrants to this country. (In 1945 it was moved to the entrance hallway.)Įmma Lazarus was already a well-known poet when she wrote “The New Colossus.” I commend you to read her “Echoes,” “Life and Art,” “Age and Death,” and so many more. The poem was inscribed in 1903 on a plaque which was placed on the statue’s pedestal. The statue was to be approximately the same height as the Colossus of Rhodes. She submitted it to an auction to aid the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund, a fund established to facilitate the building of a base upon which to park the Statue of Liberty, created by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, then being given by France to the United States. The earthquake of 226 BCE took it down.īearing a date of November 2, 1883, “The New Colossus” was a poem, a sonnet, by Emma Lazarus (an American Jew, -). They believe it was about 108 feet high not counting its base. A statue of the Greek sun god Helios, it stood looking out to the harbor on the island of Rhodes, put there by Chares of Lindos in 280 BCE. The Colossus of Rhodes (in Greek, ὁ Κολοσσὸς Ῥόδιος) is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was, then, a double-edged sword-one which can be compared to Kafka’s representation of the Statue of Liberty in his novel Amerika, which replaced the famous lamp with a sword.Maybe to understand what the New Colossus is we should have an inkling what the old one was. But, like many human creations, the creature became unmanageable and had to be put down (the incantation to do so was a Hebrew pun). The Golem was a figure of Jewish folklore, a giant created to protect the people from pogroms. Her vision of the statue, as Cavitch tells its, is a sort of incarnation of the Golem. It generally was, or was held to be, an immigrant voice and often a Jewish voice.” Lazarus was descended from Sephardic Jews who had been in New York since before the American Revolution. Just a year before Lazarus wrote her poem, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed: the first American law to prevent a specific people from immigrating to the U.S.Ĭavitch writes of the 1880s, “The voice of liberty was, in many respects, the voice of anarchy. In fact, it was erected during a time of growing nativist backlash to immigration. Yet the statue itself was not originally conceived of as a beacon to immigrants. until the “golden door” was pulled shut in the 1920s. The Mother of Exiles thus greeted the great migration of Europeans to the U.S. In 1903, the sonnet, revived by a friend, was put up on the pedestal. Lazarus died of cancer the following year and her poem was largely forgotten until the turn of the century. Lazarus called the monument, a gift from the French, “Mother of Exiles.” The statue was completed in 1886. The poem was to be a part of the statue’s pedestal. Lazarus (1849-1887) was solicited to write the sonnet for a fundraising effort for Auguste Bartholdi and Gustave Eiffel’s enormous statue, which was formally called Liberty Enlightening the World ( La Liberté éclairant le monde). Manuscript of the sonnet “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, dated 1883. But this is only one aspect of the intersection between the poem and the statue, as Max Cavitch shows in this illuminating American Literary History paper. That bit was actually excised from a version of Lazarus’s poem engraved at JFK International Airport in the 1950s (which was known then as Idlewild Airport). The phrase “wretched refuse” has an interesting history. In Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “ The New Colossus,” the Statue of Liberty declares, “Give me your tired, your poor./ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” The lines are so well known they make for easy political scoring-points, used most recently against some Americans comfortable with closing the borders to Syrian refugees.