Emma Lazarus is best remembered for her sonnet "The New Colossus" (1883), which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Born in New York City, a precocious child of wealthy and cultured parents, she was an avid reader and student. Her first book of rather conventional poetry, Poems and Translations (1866), was published when she was only 17. Her second, Admetus and Other Poems (1871), was dedicated to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had responded positively to her work. Her many translations---Heinrich Heine and Friedrich von Schiller from German, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas (pere) from French, and medieval poetry from Hebrew---attest to her scholarship and facility with languages.… Some of her best work, included in Songs of a Semite (1882), arose from her commitment to her Jewish heritage and her response to the persecution of Jews in Europe, especially the Russian pogroms of 1882.
