The New Colossus

 

This poem was written as a donation to an auction of art and literary works^[3] conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" to raise money for the pedestal's construction.^[4] Lazarus's contribution was solicited by fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts. Initially, she refused but writer Constance Cary Harrison convinced her that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor.^[5] Lazarus was involved in aiding Jewish refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue.^[6]

"The New Colossus" was the first entry read at the exhibit's opening on November 2, 1883. It remained associated with the exhibit through a published catalog until the exhibit closed after the pedestal was fully funded in August 1885,^[7][8] but was forgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886. It was, however, published in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as well as The New York Times during this time period.^[9] In 1901, Lazarus's friend Georgina Schuyler began an effort to memorialize Lazarus and her poem, which succeeded in 1903 when a plaque bearing the text of the poem was put on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.^[4]

On the plaque hanging inside the Statue of Liberty, the line "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" is missing the comma after the word "keep."^[10] The plaque also describes itself as an engraving; it is actually a casting.^{[citation needed]}

The original manuscript is held by the American Jewish Historical Society.^[11]

 

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet.^[13]

The title of the poem and the first two lines reference the Greek Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a famously gigantic sculpture that stood beside or straddled the entrance to the harbor of the island of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC. In the poem, Lazarus contrasts that ancient symbol of grandeur and empire ("the brazen giant of Greek fame") with a "New" Colossus – the Statue of Liberty, a female embodiment of commanding "maternal strength" ("Mother of Exiles").^[13][14]

The "sea-washed, sunset gates" are the mouths of the Hudson and East Rivers, to the west of Brooklyn. The "imprisoned lightning" refers to the electric light in the torch, then a novelty.

The "air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame" refers to New York Harbor between New York City and Brooklyn, which were separate cities at the time the poem was written, before being consolidated as boroughs of the City of Greater New York in 1898.^[14]

The "huddled masses" refers to the large numbers of immigrants arriving in the United States in the 1880s, particularly through the port of New York.^[15] Lazarus was an activist and advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Imperial Russia.^[16]

 

Paul Auster wrote that "Bartholdi's gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but 'The New Colossus' reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world."^[17]

John T. Cunningham wrote that "The Statue of Liberty was not conceived and sculpted as a symbol of immigration, but it quickly became so as immigrant ships passed under the torch and the shining face, heading toward Ellis Island. However, it was [Lazarus's poem] that permanently stamped on Miss Liberty the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants."^[18]

The poem was quoted in John F. Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants (1958).^[19] In 2019, during the Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, whom Trump appointed as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, revised a line from the poem in support of the administration's "public charge rule" to reject applicants for visas or green cards on the basis of income and education. Cuccinelli added the caveat "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge"; later suggested that the "huddled masses" were European; and downplayed the poem as it was "not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty." Cuccinelli's remark prompted criticism.^[20][21][22] The Trump administration rule was later blocked by a federal appeals court.^[23]

 

Lazarus's sonnet appears in various creative works. The 1941 motion picture Hold Back the Dawn paraphrases "The New Colossus" in its dialogue.^[24][25] Alfred Hitchcock's wartime film Saboteur (1942) had dialogue near the close, in which a character quotes lines from the sonnet.^[26][19] An Irving Berlin production called Miss Liberty ran for about a year around 1949. One of the songs was "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor".^[19][27] The musician Joan Baez collaborated on a soundtrack to Italian film Sacco & Vanzetti and used text from "The New Colossus" for some of the lyrics.^[28] "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor"—a song from the soundtrack of 1986 animated film An American Tail—includes a choral arrangement of "The New Colossus" praised by The Mary Sue as "powerful stuff".^[29] By 2020, the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City produced a New Colossus Project of exhibitions, videos, and curriculum related to the poem. It also hosts the Emma Lazarus Translation Project. Translations of the poem into other languages by poets from around the world are collected.^[30][31]

 

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The New Colossus

•   The New Colossus public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• "A Century of Immigration, 1820–1924". Library of Congress. September 9, 2004. Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, New York and Newton Centre, Massachusetts. Emma Lazarus' handwritten sonnet "The New Colossus"
• ———. Schor, Esther (ed.). The New Colossus (interactive ed.). Nextbook Press.
• Manuscript notebook from the Emma Lazarus collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. Includes an undated manuscript version of "The New Colossus".
• Cavitch, Max (2008). "Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty". In The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. Meredith L. McGill (ed.). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. app. 97–122.
• Marom, Daniel (2000). "Who Is the 'Mother of Exiles'? An Inquiry into Jewish Aspects of Emma Lazarus's 'The New Colossus'". Prooftexts. 20 (3): 231–61. doi:10.1353/ptx.2000.0020. S2CID 161389678.