Born in New York City on July 22, 1849, Emma Lazarus came of a wealthy family and was educated privately. She early displayed a talent for poetry, and her first book, Poems and Translations, 1867, was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom her next, Admetus and Other Poems, 1871, was dedicated. These and subsequent volumes╤the prose Alide: An Episode of Goethe╒s Life, 1874, a verse tragedy, The Spagnoletto, 1876, and a fine translation of Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine, 1881╤were cosmopolitan in flavor, sometimes technically excellent, but lacking in real distinction.
About 1881, however, with the wave of immigration to the United States from European and Russian ghettoes, Lazarus turned from literary dilettantism and took up the defense of persecuted Jews and of Judaism and began to work for the relief of immigrants. She published numerous essays in the Century and the weekly American Hebrew on the pogroms and persecutions and the often equivocal attitude of the Christian West. She was an early advocate of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1882 she produced Songs of a Semite, which included such powerful pieces as ╥The Dance to Death,╙ ╥The Banner of the Jew,╙ and ╥The Crowing of the Red Cock.╙ Her sonnet on the Statue of Liberty, ╥The New Colossus,╙ written in 1883, was chosen to be inscribed on the base of the monument, and it remains a most moving and eloquent expression of an American ideal: ╥Give me your tired, your poor,╙ the sonnet concludes, ╥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!╙ Her last book, a series of prose poems published under the title By the Waters of Babylon, appeared in 1887. After four years of declining health and intermittent depression Emma Lazarus died in New York City on November 19, 1887.
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