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The New Colossus

"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).[2] In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level.

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

The New Colossus

1883

Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, New York City[1]

Emma Lazarus

To raise money for construction of the statue's pedestal

In popular culture[edit]

Parts of the poem also appear in popular culture. The Broadway musical Miss Liberty, with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, an immigrant himself, used the final stanza beginning "Give me your tired, your poor" as the basis for a song.[19][24] Joan Baez used the second half of the poem in her lyrics to The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti Part 1 which forms parts of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to the 1971 Italian film Sacco & Vanzetti, based on the events surrounding the trial and judicial execution of the Italian-born American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.[25]


The American Jewish Historical Society in New York City has a "New Colossus Project" of exhibitions, videos, and curriculum related to the poem. It also hosts the "New Colossus Translation Project" (produced by Alicia Ostriker, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Tess O'Dwyer); it publishes translations of the poem into other languages by poets from around the world, including Emma Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor's translation into Esperanto, Karen Alkalay-Gut's into Hebrew, Ming Di's into Chinese, Dunya Mikhail's into Arabic, and Giannina Braschi into Spanish.[26][27]


The poem is frequently recited or referenced in works of fiction, such as literature, film, and video games. Some examples include a version of the poem recited in Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest (first published in Chinese in 2008 and in English in 2015), the second volume of the science-fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past.[28] The poem was also read in the 1941 film Hold Back the Dawn as well as being recited by the heroine in Alfred Hitchcock's wartime film Saboteur.[19] It is recited by B.J. Blazkowicz at the end of the 2014 video game Wolfenstein: The New Order. The poem is also the subtitle of the game's sequel: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. In Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City, a character based on Emma Lazarus and bearing the same name appears in several episodes.

public domain audiobook at LibriVox

The New Colossus

. 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"

"A Century of Immigration, 1820–1924"

———. Schor, Esther (ed.). (interactive ed.). Nextbook Press.

The New Colossus

at the American Jewish Historical Society. Includes an undated manuscript version of "The New Colossus".

Manuscript notebook from the Emma Lazarus collection

Cavitch, Max (2008). . In The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange. Meredith L. McGill (ed.). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. app. 97–122.

"Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty"

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. :10.1353/ptx.2000.0020. S2CID 161389678.

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