Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings

The greatest American Jewish author of the nineteenth century, Emma Lazarus was a celebrated poet and humanitarian activist. This edition is a broad collection of her writings, including her essays, previously unpublished poems, her innovative late work, and, in its entirety, her most important book, Songs of a Semite (1882). Her best known poem, “The New Colossus” (the 1883 Statue of Liberty poem that made Lazarus a national icon), is also here, along with a selection of cultural documents that help contextualize her work in relation to contemporary debates about Jewish history, the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, immigration, and antisemitism.

Gregory Eiselein is a professor of English at Kansas State University. He is the author of Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era (1996) and the editor of Infelicia and Other Writings, by Adah Isaacs Menken (Broadview Press, 2002).