“The New Colossus” emerges at a pivotal moment in history. The Major Flaw of You’ve Got Mail Megan Garber But the details of the poem’s production and of its author’s biography do not fully capture the conditions under which the poem emerged, conditions that help to explain the poem’s message to its immiserated masses. She wrote the sonnet, after some persuasion by friends, for an auction to raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The Jewish Lazarus was a prolific writer in multiple genres, a political activist, a translator, and an associate of late-19th-century literati-including Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell. The story of the poem’s creation has circulated almost as widely as the lines of Lazarus’s poem. Whether the popularity of “The New Colossus” is a consequence of the poem’s timelessness, its curious forgettability, or its “ schmaltzy” sincerity, writers, readers, and politicians resurrect Lazarus’s sonnet to speak directly to a present moment in which anti-black racism, xenophobia, immigration bans, and refugee crises define the terms of U.S. To marshal Lazarus’s poem in support of a redefinition of American greatness, however, is to capitulate to the terms of Trump’s exceptionalism-and to ignore the poem’s own radical imagination of hospitality.Ī little like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” published in 1916, “The New Colossus” is one of those poems that is constantly rediscovered and recontextualized. For Pelosi, diversity is both the existing strength of America and its source of revitalization. It’s a recognition that the strength of our country is in its diversity, that the revitalization … of America comes from our immigrant population.” For Comey, diversity is greatness. It’s a statement of values of our country.
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Comey’s tweet echoes Nancy Pelosi’s interpretation from early 2017: “You know the rest. Several other public citations of Lazarus assume that her poem is reducible to a message about the value of diversity.
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Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” This country’s greatness and true genius lies in its diversity. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.