Emma Lazarus and Edgar Allan Poe

Emma Lazarus quotes Edgar Allan Poe – rare documentation of the impact of Poe on the foremost female Jewish poet in 19th-century America. This is a rare manuscript by Emma Lazarus, “the first significant American Jewish literary figure” (ANB). “Not many autographs are so desirable as that of Emma Lazarus … her autograph is extremely rare” (Charles Hamilton, Collecting Autographs and Manuscripts, 1961).

This manuscript reflects young Emma Lazarus’s burgeoning interest in poetry as well as the place of Edgar Allan Poe in the pantheon of American poets at this early date. Seventeen-year-old Emma writes out one of Poe’s most famous poems:

Thou wouldst be loved? — then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not!
Being everything which now thou art,
Be nothing which thou art not.
So with the world thy gentle ways,
Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
Shall be an endless theme of praise,
And love — a simple duty.

Here Lazarus titles the poem “To Louise” (the identity of Emma’s friend remains unknown). Poe first composed the poem as “To Elizabeth,” and it was first printed in 1835 as “Lines written in an Album.” The frequently reprinted poem appeared in The Raven and Other Poems addressed to Frances Sargent Osgood.

Emma Lazarus was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York in 1849. She was well educated and took a keen interest in reading, translating, and writing poetry. In 1866 Lazarus privately published her first book, Poetry and Translations Written Between Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen. That same year she wrote this manuscript in a friend’s album. “The work attracted the attention of poets and critics, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became her friend and mentor. Before Lazarus, the only Jewish poets published in the United States were humorists and hymnal writers. Her book Songs of a Semite was the first collection of poetry to explore Jewish American identity while struggling with the problems of modern poetics” (American Academy of Poets).

Around 1879 Lazarus became aware of, and was incensed by, the persecution of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, leading to a mass exodus to America. She became active in helping the refugees, donating and raising money, and railing in the press against antisemitism in America and abroad. She became one of the earliest advocates for establishing an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Lazarus is most famous for “The New Colossus” (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”). She wrote the poem as part of the campaign to raise funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, then being fabricated in France. The poem, which would ultimately be inscribed on a plaque on the pedestal, helped to transform the statue from a symbol of friendship between France and the Untied States to a welcoming icon of liberty and freedom.

Lazarus died in 1887 at the age of thirty-eight. Her autograph is among the rarest of the major American poets of the nineteenth century.

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