"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. "The New Colossus" is a sonnet written in 1883 by American poet Elizabeth Lazarus, but most people know only this snippet, used to represent the American dream that hundreds of immigrants were chasing when they arrived at Ellis Island to start a new life in America.
The poem had a particular purpose beyond literature; it was written to raise money for the construction of a pedestal that would bear the weight of the Statue of Liberty. This was also quite a weight of responsibility for Lazarus. In order to raise the money needed, She had originally been reluctant to produce a poem for the fund, but was finally persuaded to do so when she was convinced that the Statue of Liberty would be a beacon of hope for immigrants.Lazarus was a Jewish immigrant and much of her poetry focuses on the subject of immigrant Lazarus donated the manuscript to an auction of literary works and artwork hosted by the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty. Two decades later, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque, and mounted inside the lower level of the pedestal.
"The New Colossus" is a Petrarchan sonnet, with an A-B-B-A rhyme scheme. The poem was hugely influential; originally the Statue of Liberty had been intended to represent and pay tribute to the principles of international Republicanism but after Lazarus' poem became associated with it, the Statue became less of a political statement and more a symbol of hope for the thousands of immigrants who passed by on their way to Ellis Island. President Kennedy quoted from the poem in his book "A Nation of Immigrants". Irving Berlin's musical "Miss Liberty" was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty and borrows some of the lines from Lazarus' poem.
Lazarus herself was not just a writer, but also an activist. She was something of a prodigy whose work was already being published and heralded at the tender age of fourteen. As she grew older, she became more interested in Romanticism, drawing inspiration from Greek literature and ancient stories of the gods. She was inspired later in life to re-discover her Jewish roots after reading Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. She became an advocate in New York for thousands of indigent Ashkenazi Jews escaping from persecution in Russia, inspiring her poem "In Exile."
Lazarus passed away in New York on November 19th, 1887, and a two-volume anthology of her work was published two months later.
