'Her enduring hope for freedom'

 

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” – Emma Lazarus

 

Born in New York City on this date in 1849, Lazarus wrote poetry, prose, essays and commentary while also doing myriad translations from writings in German, French and Italian.  She is perhaps best known for her 1883 sonnet The New Colossus that includes the above lines and is inscribed on a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

 

Her fame reached new generations of Americans when the sonnet was set to music by Irving Berlin in his 1949 smash hit musical Miss Liberty; and then again in 1985 in Lee Hoiby’s “The Lady of the Harbor,” part of his song cycle "Three Women.”

 

While Lazarus wrote often on behalf of immigrants and the downtrodden, her own background came from privilege and generational American roots, both sides of her family arriving in the early 1700s.  Ultimately, her poems and essays would help shape America’s understanding of its immigrant class, her themes providing enduring lessons on the nation’s immigrant experience.      

 

Although her life was cut short by cancer (she died at age 38) her works have endured.  The Poems of Emma Lazarus has been continuously in print since being published posthumously in 1889.   In 2009 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.  

 

 “Until we are all free,” Lazarus wrote about the hopes of new Americans, “we are, none of us, free.”