The New Colossus

Statue of Liberty in New York City

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]

"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,[6][7] 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.[8] 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 a comma, and reads in Lazarus's manuscript "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"[9] The plaque also describes itself as an engraving; it is actually a casting.

The original manuscript is held by the American Jewish Historical Society.[10]

The poem references the Colossus of Rhodes in the lines:
...the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land.

The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet.[12]

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").[12][13]

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.[13]

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.[14] Lazarus was an activist and advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia.[15]

Parts of the poem also appear in popular culture. The Broadway musical Miss Liberty, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, an immigrant himself, used the final stanza beginning "Give me your tired, your poor" as the basis for a song.[18][24] Joan Baez used the second half of the poem in her lyrics to The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti Part 1 which forms parts of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to the 1971 Italian film Sacco & Vanzetti, based on the events surrounding the trial and judicial execution of the Italian-born American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.[25]

The American Jewish Historical Society in New York City has a "New Colossus Project" of exhibitions, videos, and curriculum related to the poem. It also hosts the "New Colossus Translation Project" (produced by Alicia Ostriker, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Tess O'Dwyer); it publishes translations of the poem into other languages by poets from around the world, including Emma Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor's translation into Esperanto, Karen Alkalay-Gut's into Hebrew, Ming Di's into Chinese, Dunya Mikhail's into Arabic, and Giannina Braschi into Spanish.[26][27]

The poem is frequently recited or referenced in works of fiction, such as literature, film, and video games. Some examples include a version of the poem recited in Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest (first published in Chinese in 2008 and in English in 2015), the second volume of the science-fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past.[28] The poem was also read in the 1941 film Hold Back the Dawn as well as being recited by the heroine in Alfred Hitchcock's wartime film Saboteur.[18] It is recited by B.J. Blazkowicz at the end of the 2014 video game Wolfenstein: The New Order. The poem is also the subtitle of the game's sequel: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. In Dimension 20 : The Unsleeping City, Emma Lazarus was a sorceress, and she prophesied/spoke into being the campaign's plot.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The New Colossus

• The New Colossus public domain audiobook at LibriVox (multiple versions)
• "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" The poem itself, having been published in 1883 or at the very latest 1903 is in the public domain.
• ———. 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.