The New Colossus

This article is about the 19th-century sonnet. For the 2017 video game, see Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus's manuscript for "The New Colossus"
Created	1883
Location	Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, New York City
Author(s)	Emma Lazarus
Purpose	To raise money for construction of the statue's pedestal
Full text
The New Colossus at Wikisource

"The New Colossus" is a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887). She wrote the poem in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level.

History

Statue of Liberty in New York City

This poem was written as a donation to an auction of art and literary works 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. 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. Lazarus was involved in aiding Jewish refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue.

"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, 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. 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.

On the plaque hanging inside the Statue of Liberty, the line "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" is missing the comma. The plaque also describes itself as an engraving; it is actually a casting.

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

Text

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty with the text of the poem

Interpretation

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.

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").

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.

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. Lazarus was an activist and advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Imperial Russia.

Influence

New York Harbor with the Hudson River (far left), the East River (right) and the Statue of Liberty (foreground)

Immigration to the United States

Main article: Immigration to the United States

Paul Auster wrote that "Bartholdi's gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but 'The New Colossus' reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world."

John T. Cunningham wrote that "The Statue of Liberty was not conceived and sculpted as a symbol of immigration, but it quickly became so as immigrant ships passed under the torch and the shining face, heading toward Ellis Island. However, it was [Lazarus's poem] that permanently stamped on Miss Liberty the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants."

The poem was quoted in John F. Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants (1958). In 2019, during the Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, whom Trump appointed as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, revised a line from the poem in support of the administration's "public charge rule" to reject applicants for visas or green cards on the basis of income and education. Cuccinelli added the caveat "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge"; later suggested that the "huddled masses" were European; and downplayed the poem as it was "not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty." Cuccinelli's remark prompted criticism. The Trump administration rule was later blocked by a federal appeals court.

In Popular Culture

• The 1941 motion picture Hold Back the Dawn paraphrases "The New Colossus" in its dialogue.
• Alfred Hitchcock's wartime film Saboteur (1942) features dialog in which a character quotes lines from the sonnet.
• An Irving Berlin production called Miss Liberty featured a song called Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor.
• 1971, musician Joan Baez collaborated on a soundtrack to an Italian film Sacco & Vanzetti. One of the songs from the film was called "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor"
• A song from the soundtrack of 1986 animated film An American Tail includes a choral arrangement of "The New Colossus".
• In 2020, the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City produced a New Colossus Project of exhibitions, videos, and curriculum related to the poem. It also hosts the Emma Lazarus Translation Project. Translations of the poem into other languages by poets from around the world are collected.

External links

• The New Colossus public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• "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"
• ———. 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.