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Emma Lazarus, whose words give voice to the Statue of Liberty and are now inseparable from it in our collective imagination ("Give me your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses struggling to breathe free"), did not know in her lifetime that the poem "The New Colossus" would appear at that site, memorializing her avid interest during her short lifetime in the cause of rehabilitating refugees. (She was born in 1849 and died in 1887.) As we learn in Esther Schor's groundbreaking and highly readable biography, Emma Lazarus, the daughter of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family established in New York in the colonial period, was ahead of her time in many respects. She was an early feminist, a Zionist before the term Zionism was coined and the movement was recognized, an outspoken critic of Christian anti-Semitism during the Russian pogroms in the early 1880s, a poet and thinker who could hold her own in correspondence with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (who famously corresponded with Emily Dickinson during the same period). This passage from Schor's biography, ending with an elegy that Lazarus wrote on the death of President Garfield, is just one of many in which we see her as a passionate "reader" of the culture that formed her.
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It was as a critic, rather than as a poet, that Emma Lazarus entered the post-Civil War debate about American literature. In May 1881 she took umbrage at George Edward Woodberry's languid lament for "The Fortunes of Literature Under the American Republic," which appeared in the British Fortnightly Review. Woodberry, Harvard-educated, a professor at the new University of Nebraska, and contributor to the Atlantic and the Nation, despaired of a national tradition for American writing, lamenting that both Emerson and Longfellow "have left no lineage." Now, with a self-deprecating allusion to the author's academic credentials, Emma Lazarus took Woodberry on in the June 1881 Critic: "The merest tyro in the study of American literature," she wrote, "can unravel this flimsy web of sophistries." There is pique here as well as point: Woodberry's assertion that American writers relied on English models and English critics hit home. After all, her own poems had been likened to those of Browning, Tennyson, and Morris, and her reputation, even in her native country, had been consolidated by British journals.
Pique aside, the essay mounts a stirring defense of American writers in the generations after Emerson. While conceding that "Emerson stands isolated by his superiority," she traces his vital lineage in Thoreau and Burroughs. But she also lauds two important writers who stand apart from the Emersonian genealogy: Hawthorne, who provides the "inside view of New England Puritanism," and Poe, who, as even Woodberry recognized, "drank from his own glass." Beyond these internationally recognized American writers, she has several others to commend: "Is it by accident that Walt Whitman was born in America, or Lowell, or Holmes, or Bret Harte, or the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' or, to come down to the present moment, the men who wrote the 'Fool's Errand,' and 'Creole Days'?" To include Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman novelist; Bret Harte, half Jewish; the controversial Whitman; the abolitionist Albion Winegar Tourgée, exposer of the Ku Klux Klan (and, later, Homer J. Plessy's attorney in Plessy v. Ferguson); and the southern writer George Washington Cable is to offer a bold, capacious vision for the future of American literature.
From her earliest poems of the Civil War, the South was always an essential part of Emma Lazarus’s sense of the nation. In a poem called "The South," written in the late 1870s, she imagines the South as a voluptuous "creole with still-burning, languid eyes" only just awakening from a listless and sensual twilight. In this poem we find a rare image of African-Americans in her oeuvre, "swart freemen" who "bend / Bronzed backs in willing labor"—a freedom without which the South would have no hope of ever awakening, but in which even the "willing" labor of southern blacks remains backbreaking.
To Woodberry's "ridiculously obsolete" charge that American authors were dependent on English critics, she adduces a pantheon of American critics: James Russell Lowell, Stedman, Henry James, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Howells. American writers, she retorts, had in fact shaped English tastes: Dickens was at first compared to Irving, and Emerson was the first critical voice to plump for Carlyle. A bravura performance, the essay ends with a flourish: "In short, we cannot help thinking that the literary history of the past fifty years in America contrasts favorably with that of the past fifty years in England. . . ."
. . .That summer, [Edmund Clarence] Stedman continued the debate, publishing in Scribner’s a substantial two-part essay championing "Poetry in America." This, too, she read in draft, with mixed emotions. On one hand, she was peeved that Stedman noted her for her translations rather than for her own verse; on the other hand, his essay vindicated her own ringing declaration of America's cultural independence. Stedman had even extended her own diverse canon to another important source of diversity: "Here are the emigrants or descendants of every people in Europe,—to go no farther,—and all their languages, and customs, and traditions, and modes of feeling, at one time or another, have come with them. Hence our unconscious habitude of variety, the disinclination to cling to one way of life or thought until its perfect conclusion. There is ferment in new blood." New blood, fresh vitality. "Criticism such as this," she told Stedman, "has not before been written in America."
On one point, however, she disagreed strongly with Stedman. That an American tradition had only recently emerged he blamed on a "scarcity of home-themes"; "the general independence and comfort," he explained, "have not bred those dramatic elements which imply conditions of splendor and squalor, glory and shame, triumph and despair." She responded tartly: "I never have believed in the want of a theme," she informed him; "wherever there is humanity, there is the theme for a great poem. . . ." For all her fervor about American literature, Emma Lazarus imagined the essence of America's "great poem" to be something far humbler than the blaze of national pride.
Within days of writing these words, she learned that President Garfield had been shot in the back by a lawyer, disgruntled after being turned down for an ambassadorial post. Cared for at the White House by a team of doctors, the president survived for nearly two months, his prospects waxing and waning with each new day. One day the papers declared "The Danger Line Passed," the next, that there were "Many Serious Dangers Still on the Way to Recovery." In September the president was deemed well enough to travel to his home in Long Branch, New Jersey. But the journey proved ill-advised, and he succumbed, twenty-five years to the day after the Battle of Chickamauga, in which he had served.
Moved to join in the national mourning, she composed an elegy . . . which appeared in the Critic. Her poem seeks no empyreal destiny for the late president and offers no noble consolation.
Sunrise: September 26, 1881
Crowned not for some transcendent gift,
Genius of power that may lift
A Cæsar or a Bonaparte
Up to the starred goal of his heart;
But that he was the epitome
Of all the people aim to be.
Were they his dying trust? He was
No less their model and their glass.
In him the daily traits were viewed
Of the undistinguished multitude.
Democratic and chaste, her elegy invokes the grief not of heroes but of the "undistinguished multitude"—a glimpse, perhaps, of the "huddled masses" she would invoke a year later.
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Excerpt from EMMA LAZARUS. Copyright © 2006 by Esther Schorr. Excerpted by permission of Schocken Books, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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