The Spagnoletto: 'While I paint, all else escapes my sense''

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22nd, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family, the fourth of seven children.

Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. As a young child she developed an interest in poetry, writing her first verses at age eleven.

The Civil War propelled her verse forward and her collection ‘Poems and Translations’, written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen was released in 1867. A further volume appeared four years later as did recognition from both home and abroad.

During the next decade, in which ‘Phantasies’ and ‘Epochs’ were written, her poems appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and Scribner's Monthly.

As well as her prose productions, including ‘The Spagnoletto’ (1876), a tragedy and ‘The Dance to Death’, about the burning of Jews during the Black Death, she was also an expert translator of von Goethe, Heine and of Hebrew poets of the medieval period. These experiences helped develop a growing activism on behalf of Jews displaced by pogroms, prejudice and the like and she founded, worked and volunteered in organisations helping Jewish people as they came to America.

Perhaps her greatest contribution though is via the bronze plague affixed to the Statue of Liberty bearing her poem ‘The New Colossus’ and the immortal lines ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….’

Her last published work in 1887, "By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose", furthers her claim to amongst the foremost poets in American literature.

Emma Lazarus returned to New York City seriously ill after a long trip to Europe. She died two months later, on the 19th November 1887. She was 38.

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