Essay Questions

What is the Lazarus alluding to in the opening line of “1492” when she calls that year two-faced?

The immediate connection most people will make to the year 1492 is the one inculcated by academic propaganda regarding a certain Mr. Columbus sailing a certain ocean blue in that particular year. So ingrained has the myth of Columbus become that 1492 is shorthand for the birth of America in some ways because his first voyage has come to be viewed as the introduction of European to the “New World.” Regardless of the politics of the situation, there is no denying that this event taking place in that year did, indeed, change only everything for the better (as well as for the worse) for generations of people. That is one of the faces of 1492. The other presents a much difficult case for finding some positive: it was the year that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree that all Jews be expelled from Spain.

What is extraordinary about the narration of “April 27, Eighteen Sixty-Five” which is one of the earliest poems composed by Lazarus?

Emma Lazarus is so much more than the words inscribed on Lady Liberty. While justifiably famous for as long as the statue lasts for the poem she contributed to the statue, her talent runs much wider and digs much deeper. During the period after the Civil War, many of the country’s most famous writers and an almost incalculable number of unknown writers went to battle themselves to fight a war over who could capture the atrocity of the very existence and necessity of that engagement in verse. The war had to that point produced an inexhaustible supply of elegies about heroic on both sides (a remarkable achievement from the perspective of a “good war” with only one heroic side to it) and a heavy focus the actual fighting itself which served to sanctify the bloody battlefields.

In New York City, however, a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl decided to take a different path—one left almost entirely to her own—in exploring the aftermath of the long, brutal conflict. Emma Lazarus chose to climb inside the head of a man ten years older herself who had called the Confederacy home and was national famous as a matinee idol long before become internationally infamous as the first Presidential assassin. The dialogue sections of this poem are a first-person interior monologue by John Wilkes Booth. In another poem written around the same time, Lazarus also wrote a lamentation for the most hated man in American from perspective of his own mother, grieving that her son has no gravesite which she can mourn her loss.

Which poem by Lazarus is a paean to the economic theory known as Georgism decades before that theory was finally recognized for its merit by actual economists?

In 1879 Henry George published a critical economic text titled Progress and Poverty and soon afterward made the prescient predication to his father that although it would perhaps be recognized for its own greatness while he lived, he had no doubt that it would one day be so recognized. He was right on both accounts as the book was virtually ignored for several decades but would eventually come to be recognized as a groundbreaking classic of the discipline. One of the very first to recognize the greatness that George was so confident about was Lazarus who published a poem sharing the title of the book just two years after its publication. In fact, the poem—which ends with striking imagery asking “who feed the ravenous monster” in relation to the cargo supply of slaves necessary to fuel the American economy—commences with a recognition between the title and the opening line that explains its origin:

[After reading Mr. Henry’s George’s book.]