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 This edition is a broad collection of her writings, including her essays, previously unpublished poems, her innovative late work, and, in its entirety, her most important book, Songs of a Semite (1882).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.
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award Emma Lazarus’s most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable story has remained a mystery until now. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980s, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity—as a feminist, a Zionist, and a trailblazing Jewish-American writer. Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus’s place in history as an activist and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today. As a stunning rebuke to fear, xenophobia, and isolationism, Lazarus's life and work are more relevant now than ever before.
The first important American Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus is remembered above all for her classic sonnet “The New Colossus,” whose phrases (“Give me your tired, your poor.”) have become part of the American language. In this new selection of Lazarus’s work, John Hollander demonstrates that in her relatively brief life she achieved real poetic mastery in a variety of modes. In early poems like “Phantasies” and “Symphonic Studies,” she explored fluently imagined inner landscapes suggested by the music of Schumann. Later, her deepening interest in Jewish history and culture was expressed in such powerful poems as “1492,” “The New Ezekiel,” and “The Guardian of the Red Disk.” Influenced both by American models, among them her poetic mentor Emerson, and by the poets whose work she translated, including Heinrich Heine and the medieval Hebrew poets Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Judah ha-Levi, she forged a poetic style of high technical accomplishment and moral passion. Long neglected, her work is revealed in this volume as an important contribution to American poetry. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...Who wrote these words? And why? In 1883, Emma Lazarus, deeply moved by an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, wrote a sonnet that was to give voice to the Statue of Liberty. Originally a gift from France to celebrate our shared national struggles for liberty, the Statue, thanks to Emma's poem, slowly came to shape our hearts, defining us as a nation that welcomes and gives refuge to those who come to our shores. This title has been selected as a Common Core Text Exemplar (Grades 4-5, Poetry)
With biographical sketch by her sister, Josephine Lazarus, originally published in Century magazine, Oct., 1888. cf. Jewish ency. Part of the poems are reprinted from the Century, Lippincott's magazine, the Critic, and the American Hebrew. CONTENTS.- I. Narrative, lyric, and dramatic.- II. Jewish poems: translations.
Excerpt from Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death, and Other Poems Scene I. A Street in the Judengasse, outside the Synagogue. During this scene Jews and Jewesses, singly and in groups, with prayer-books in their hands pass across the stage and go into the Synagogue. Among them, enter Baruch and Naphtali. Naphtali. Hast seen him yet? Baruch. Nay; Rabbi Jacob's door Swung to behind him, just as I puffed up O'erblown with haste. See how our years weigh, cousin. Who'd judge me with this paunch a temperate man, A man of modest means, a man withal Scarce overpast his prime? Well, God be praised, If age bring no worse burden! Who is this stranger? Simon the Leech tells me he claims to bear Some special message from the Lord - no doubt To-morrow, fresh from rest, he'll publish it Within the Synagogue Naphtali. To-morrow, man? He will not hear of rest - he comes anon - Shall we within? Baruch. Rather let's wait, And scrutinize him as he mounts the street. Since you denote him so remarkable, You've whetted my desire. Naphtali. A blind, old man, Mayhap is all you'll find him - spent with travel. His raiment fouled with dust, his sandaled feet Road-bruised by stone and. bramble. But his face! - Majestic with long fall of cloud-white beard, And hoary wreath of hair - oh, it is one Already kissed by angels. Baruch. Look, there limps Little Manasseh, bloated as his purse, And wrinkled as a frost-pinched fruit. I hear His last loan to the Syndic will result In quadrupling his wealth. Good Lord! what luck Blesses some folk, while good men stint and sweat And scrape, to merely fill the household larder. What said you of this pilgrim, Naphtali? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Dialect poems by one of the nineteenth century's most talented African American lyricists Paul Laurence Dunbar was “the most promising young colored man” in nineteenth-century America, according to Frederick Douglass, and subsequently one of the most controversial. His plantation lyrics, written while he was an elevator boy in Ohio, established Dunbar as the premier writer of dialect poetry and garnered him international recognition. More than a vernacular lyricist, Dunbar was also a master of classical poetic forms, who helped demonstrate to post–Civil War America that literary genius did not reside solely in artists of European descent. William Dean Howells called Dunbar’s dialect poems “evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Rich treasury of verse from the 19th and 20th centuries includes works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, other notables.
This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.
