Volume 54, Number 2 · February 15, 2007
The Convert
By Christopher Benfey
Emma Lazarus
by Esther Schor
Nextbook/Schocken, 348 pp., $21.95
Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems
edited by John Hollander
American Poets Project/Library of America, 151 pp., $20.00
For most Americans, the name Emma Lazarus is likely to recall at best a brief injunction associated with the Statue of Liberty: 'Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi's statue Liberty Enlightening the World was a gift from the people of France, meant to serve as a monument to a hundred years of friendship between the two nations conceived in Liberté. If the statue was free, the considerable costs associated with its installation were not. Congress agreed to pay for erecting and maintaining it, but balked at paying for the pedestal. Various schemes were launched to raise funds, amid widespread ridicule. Montague Marks, an art critic who later married Lazarus's younger sister Agnes, compared the torch to 'an immense double tooth which has just been extracted from some unfortunate mastodon.' Friends of the architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had designed the pedestal for the statue for Bedloe's Island (renamed Liberty Island in 1956), decided in May 1883 to organize a benefit exhibition. Emma Lazarus, a close friend of several of the artists involved, was asked by the writer Constance Cary Harrison to write a poem for the catalog.
Review, 4114 words
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