Emma Lazarus Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849, in New York City, into a long-established Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese descent. Her father, Moses Lazarus, was a prosperous merchant, and her mother, Esther Nathan Lazarus, presided over a large, close-knit household. The family's standing afforded Emma a rigorous private education. She studied languages, read widely in European and classical literature, and began composing verse at an early age. Among her siblings, her sister Josephine Lazarus would later play a vital role in preserving Emma's work and memory through editing and biography.

Literary Beginnings
Lazarus's literary talent emerged early. In 1866 she privately printed a first volume, Poems and Translations (Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen), and sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The eminent essayist responded with encouragement, beginning a warm intellectual friendship that gave the young poet a place within American literary circles. Emerson's mentorship helped steady her ambitions and sharpen her ear for form and idea.

Her first decade as a published writer yielded a varied body of work. Admetus and Other Poems (1871) displayed her command of classical allusion and lyric structure. Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (1874), a short novel, reimagined an episode from the young Goethe's biography, reflecting her immersion in German letters. The Spagnoletto: A Drama in Verse (1876) explored art, power, and moral choice through the life of the Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera. These early books placed her comfortably among postbellum American writers who were testing transatlantic themes while rooting themselves in American letters.

Translations and Critical Interests
Lazarus proved as adept a translator and critic as she was a poet. In the early 1880s she published translations of Heinrich Heine, bringing the wit and melancholy of the German-Jewish poet to American readers in supple English verse. Her essays and reviews showed broad learning, engaging Dante, Goethe, and the contemporary English novel. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda especially influenced her thinking, affirming the dignity of Jewish history and identity and nudging her toward subjects that would soon define her mature voice.

A Turning Point: Jewish Consciousness and Public Advocacy
The pogroms that followed the assassination of the Russian tsar in 1881 transformed Lazarus's outlook and commitments. Encountering newly arrived refugees in New York, she turned her pen and her energy toward their defense. She wrote a series of essays, including the influential Epistle to the Hebrews in the American Hebrew, urging American Jews to meet the crisis with organized philanthropy, cultural pride, and practical assistance. She visited the immigrant reception center on Ward's Island and aligned herself with relief efforts coordinated by Jewish charitable bodies in the city.

Her poetry shifted decisively as well. Songs of a Semite (1882) asserted a proud Jewish voice in English, weaving biblical cadence with contemporary urgency. In the same period she wrote The Dance to Death, a dramatic poem about medieval persecution, using the past to illuminate the vulnerabilities and resilience of a people in the present. Her advocacy also looked outward: she argued for both the humane reception of refugees in the United States and for the long-term promise of a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine, making her one of the early American voices to articulate a proto-Zionist vision. In philanthropic projects she lent support to practical institutions, including efforts that led to the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York, which aimed to equip newcomers with vocational skills.

The New Colossus and the Statue of Liberty
Lazarus's most famous poem, The New Colossus, arose from civic engagement rather than a purely literary occasion. In 1883, at the urging of the writer and hostess Constance Cary Harrison, she contributed a sonnet to an auction raising funds for the pedestal of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. The poem reimagined the monument not as a symbol of conquest but as a "Mother of Exiles", speaking welcome to the dispossessed. While the sonnet found readers at the time, it was not placed on the monument during her lifetime. Two decades later, her friend and ally Georgina Schuyler led a successful effort to have the poem engraved on a bronze plaque and installed inside the statue's pedestal in 1903. From that moment, Lazarus's lines, "Give me your tired, your poor", became inseparable from the national story of immigration and refuge.

Travel, Networks, and Later Work
The acclaim of the early 1880s widened Lazarus's circle and ambitions. She traveled to Europe more than once in the mid-1880s, moving between London and the Continent, reading in libraries, meeting writers and members of the Anglo-Jewish community, and continuing to publish in American periodicals such as The Century Magazine. The travels broadened her comparative perspective on the condition of Jews in Europe and America, deepened her historical range, and gave her poetry an elegiac gravity. She produced new cycles of poems that braided personal lyric with collective memory, often returning to images of exile and return. Through it all, Emerson's early encouragement remained a touchstone, even as her subjects and commitments departed from his transcendentalist concerns.

Illness and Death
Lazarus's health declined in the mid-1880s. After a final sojourn abroad, she returned to New York and died there on November 19, 1887, at the age of thirty-eight. She never married, and the work of remembering and organizing her legacy fell naturally to her family and friends. Josephine Lazarus edited The Poems of Emma Lazarus in two volumes, published in 1889, and provided a biographical sketch that remains an essential early account of her life. Friends who had rallied her to public causes, figures such as Georgina Schuyler and Constance Cary Harrison, continued to associate her name with projects that embodied her ideals of charity and welcome.

Legacy
Emma Lazarus's legacy spans two intertwined domains: American literature and American civic identity. As a poet, she stands out for integrating classical elegance, modern feeling, and Jewish historical consciousness in a distinct American idiom. Her translations of Heine and her essays on European literature helped shape the taste of readers beyond her immediate community. As an advocate, she used the cultural authority of letters to confront the urgent politics of migration and prejudice, opening a space for Jewish themes in mainstream American discourse. The later installation of The New Colossus in the Statue of Liberty transformed a fundraising sonnet into a national catechism of welcome, and secured Lazarus's place in public memory. She is remembered alongside the people who shaped her course, her parents Moses and Esther Lazarus, the mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary friend Constance Cary Harrison, the benefactor Georgina Schuyler, and the refugees whose plight redefined her vocation, as a writer whose art and conscience were inseparable.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Emma, under the main topics: Writing - Equality - Knowledge - Human Rights - Anger.

• 1883 The New Colossus (Poetry)
• 1874 Poems and Translations (Collection)
• 1871 Admetus and Other Poems (Collection)