Fame can be a funny thing. Some people expend extraordinary amounts of energy pursuing it and then when it comes it turns out to be a wonderful as they expected. Others get hit upside the head unexpectedly by it and can only twist in its powerful winds as the spotlight utterly transforms the legacy they otherwise would have had. Such is the fate of Emma Lazarus. Say that name out loud and if there is anyone who recognizes it, they will recognize it through words “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” That enormous copper lady standing out there in the middle of the harbor with her arm raised to provide a torch illuminating the way to freedom is inextricably linked to Emma Lazarus in a way that is likely going to last as long the Statue of Liberty herself.
That linkage is one of those rare examples where one single moment in time can be said to have changed the course of one person’s life forever. “The New Colossus” is the poem inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and its words have ever been since become part of the folklore of America’s status as the melting pot of the world where everybody starts out equal. That’s not true, of course, in the strictest sense of the word, but in comparison to how the game had been fixed in Europe for centuries against the lower class, it is truer than they would ever known had they stayed where they were. The words written by Lazarus bids a welcome to newly arrived immigrants to America with the promised formed by her formal tone and elevated diction suggesting that allusions to figures of ancient Greece have made that welcome the state of the nation at large. Only upon firmly settling in did the ugly truth reveal that not quite all Americans felt quite as welcoming of newcomers as Lazarus. From the very moment the process of inscribing those began, the fate of Lazarus began to change in ways that nothing could alter.
In addition to being an example of how a single decision can change an entire life—in this case the decision that was made to link Lazarus the poet to Lady Liberty—the poet also embodies the way that attaining a measure of superstar celebrity can be something significantly falling short of a blessing. Make not mistake, every writer who puts words to paper wants those words to be read by as large an audience as possible. Any writer who contends otherwise is lying to you or themselves. “The New Colossus” puts Lazarus up there among Poe, Longfellow, Sandburg and Frost as writers of the most well-known lines of verse in American history. Unlike those writers, however, that inspiration stuff about welcoming the huddled masses of poor, tired new Americans is likely the only words of Lazarus with which most people are familiar. This was not always the case. In fact, many scholars and academics have identified Lazarus as the single most important and influential Jewish-American female poet the 19th century produced.
One of the reasons that Lazarus was considered such an appropriate choice to append a poem to the Lady Liberty was her recognized voice as a leader for the feminine perspective in the poetry of the time. She came out of the school of the Transcendentalists under the tutelage of a mentor with a more recognizable name, perhaps: Ralph Waldo Emerson. While no one should ever seriously think of rejecting such an affiliation, it likely had a retarding effect on her talent. She pursued the Transcendentalist school, but was really cut out for something more specific to her experiences.
Another reason she was the appropriate choice to write the poem for the statue stems from the way in which she totally threw herself into the issue of the Jewish immigrant situation in New York City. It was a hands-on approach which produced essays and other works of prose, but which ultimately wielded the most artistic influence on her poetry. Lazarus also enjoyed tremendous success as a playwright; she (as well as her sister Josephine) excelled across the spectrum of literary forms and it is through that versatility that her poetry especially began to really take shape and direction.
The great irony of the life of Emma Lazarus is that she rose to the ranks of the most respected women writers of her time by not limiting herself and by engaging her personal experiences to connect with the broader social issues related to her Jewish heritage to finally shed the ill-fitting wings of Transcendentalism with which she hoped to soar to the first ranks of writers. Only after no longer being constrained by what she wasn’t was finally able to become what she was: specifically a writer with so many oppressive strikes against her that she really had nothing to lose by subverting expectations. That earlier poetry written under the guiding eye of Emerson is almost universally rejected today as too derivative and not nearly as authentic as it should be. The later poetry was written directly the heart with a shift from the formality that marks “The New Colossus” with its reliance upon the detachment of allusion and the adherence to the rules of meter and rhyme.
Although that poem belongs to the later period, it was written for a broader audience and as such still stands out from the verse that truly is representative of the woman destined for the lofty honors awarded her standing among 19th century peers. The entirety of her self-described “Little Poems in Prose” collective titled “By the Waters of Babylon” barely seems likely to have been written by the same hand. Likewise, the distinctly Jewish poems such as “The New Ezekiel” and “Bar Kochba” suggest a religious intensity that makes it barely comprehensible to think she once adopted the modes of Transcendentalist thought.
The movement of Lazarus toward a more narrative and dramatic-based style of writing verse seems to have unleashed the true passion within in ways that simple are not apparent in her earliest poems. The willful diving into social issues of the times became a force that stimulated a talent buried deep and which was for a time facing the threat of being subsumed into trying to accomplish something else. So the irony of her legacy is deepened twofold. After digging herself out of a hole she put herself into to soar to heights, she winds up falling back to earth right into that hole again by a nation willing to extol her for just one single produce of her imagination. It is, in some ways, a cautionary tale.
