EMMA

LAZARUS (1849–1887)  , American Jewish poetess, was born in New York . When the Civil War broke out she was soon inspired to lyric expression . Her first book (1867) included poems and translations which she wrote between the ages of fourteen and seventeen . As yet her models were classic and romantic . At the age of twenty-one she published Admetus and other Poems (1871) . Admetus is inscribed to Emerson, who greatly influenced her, and with whom she maintained a regular correspondence for several years . She led a retired life, and had a modest conception of her own powers . Much of her next work appeared in Lippincott's Magazine, but in 1874 she published a prose romance (Abide) based on Goethe's autobiography, and received a generous letter of admiration from Turgeniev . Two years later she visited Concord and made the acquaintance of the Emerson circle, and while there read the proof-sheets of her tragedy The Spagnoletto . In 1881 she published her excellent translations of Heine's poems . Meanwhile events were occurring which appealed to her Jewish sympathies and gave a new turn to her feeling . The Russian massacres of 1880–1881 were a trumpet-call to her .

So far her Judaism had been latent . She belonged to the

oldest Jewish congregation of New York, but she had not for some years taken a personal part in the observances of the synagogue . But from this time she took up the cause of her race, and " her verse rang out as it had never rung before, a clarion note, calling a people to heroic action and unity; to the consciousness and fulfilment of a grand destiny." Her poems, " The Crowing of the Red Cock " and " The Banner of the Jew " (1882) stirred the Jewish consciousness and helped to produce the new Zionism (q.v.) . She now wrote another drama, the Dance to Death, the scene of which is laid in Nordhausen in the 14th century; it is based on the accusation brought against the Jews of poisoning the wells and thus causing the Black Death . The Dance to Death was included (with some translations of medieval Hebrew poems) in Songs of a Semite (1882), which she dedicated to George Eliot . In 1885 she visited Europe . She devoted much of the short remainder of her life to the cause of Jewish nationalism . In 1887 appeared By the waters of Babylon, which consists of a series of " prose poems," full of prophetic fire . She died in New York on the 19th of November 1887 . A sonnet by Emma Lazarus is engraved on a memorial tablet on the colossal Bartholdi statue of Liberty, New York . See article in the Century Magazine, New Series, xiv . 875 (portrait p .

803), afterwards prefixed as a Memoir to the collected edition of The poems of Emma Lazarus (2 vols., 1889) . (I .