Writer The first stimulus for Lazarus's writing was offered by the
American Civil War. A collection of her
Poems and Translations, verses written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, appeared in 1867 (New York), and was commended by
William Cullen Bryant. It included translations from
Friedrich Schiller,
Heinrich Heine,
Alexandre Dumas, and
Victor Hugo.
Admetus and Other Poems followed in 1871. The title poem was dedicated "To my friend
Ralph Waldo Emerson", whose works and personality were exercising an abiding influence upon the poet's intellectual growth. During the next decade, in which "Phantasies" and "Epochs" were written, her poems appeared chiefly in ''
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and Scribner's Monthly''. By this time, Lazarus's work had won recognition abroad. Her first prose production, ''Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life
, a romance treating of the Friederike Brion incident, was published in 1874 (Philadelphia), and was followed by The Spagnoletto
(1876), a tragedy. Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine'' (New York, 1881) followed, and was prefixed by a biographical sketch of Heine; Lazarus's renderings of some of Heine's verse are considered among the best in English. In the same year, 1881, she became friends with
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. In April 1882, Lazarus published in
The Century Magazine the article "Was the
Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" Her statement of the reasons for answering this question in the affirmative may be taken to close what may be termed the Hellenic and journeyman period of Lazarus's life, during which her subjects were drawn from classic and romantic sources. Lazarus also wrote
The Crowing of the Red Cock, and the sixteen-part cycle poem "Epochs". In addition to writing her own poems, Lazarus edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine. She also wrote a novel and two plays in five acts,
The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama about
the titular figure and
The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in
Nordhausen during the
Black Death. During the time Lazarus became interested in her Jewish roots, she continued her purely literary and critical work in magazines with such articles as "Tommaso Salvini", "Salvini's 'King Lear, "Emerson's Personality", "Heine, the Poet", "A Day in Surrey with William Morris", and others. Lines from her sonnet "
The New Colossus" appear on a bronze plaque which was placed in the pedestal of the
Statue of Liberty in 1903. The sonnet was written in 1883 and donated to an auction, conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the
Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" in order to raise funds to build the pedestal. Lazarus's close friend
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired by "The New Colossus" to found the
Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne. She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887. On one of those trips,
Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the
Pre-Raphaelite painter
Edward Burne-Jones, introduced her to
William Morris at her home. She also met with
Henry James,
Robert Browning and
Thomas Huxley during her European travels. A collection of
Poems in Prose (1887) was her last book. Her
Complete Poems with a Memoir appeared in 1888, at Boston.
Activism Lazarus was a friend and admirer of the American political economist
Henry George. She believed deeply in
Georgist economic reforms and became active in the "single tax" movement for
land value tax. Lazarus published a poem in the
New York Times named after George's book,
Progress and Poverty. Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry as she heard of the Russian
pogroms that followed the
assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this
antisemitic violence, and the poor standard of living in Russia in general, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian
Pale of Settlement to New York. Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish immigrants. She helped establish the
Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide
vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. Lazarus volunteered as well in the
Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society employment bureau, although she eventually criticized its organization. In 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. The literary fruits of identification with her religion were poems like "The Crowing of the Red Cock", "The Banner of the Jew", "The Choice", "The New Ezekiel", "The Dance to Death" (a strong, though unequally executed drama), and her last published work (March 1887), "By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose", which constituted her strongest claim to a foremost rank in American literature. During the same period (1882–87), Lazarus translated the Hebrew poets of medieval Spain with the aid of the German versions of
Michael Sachs and
Abraham Geiger, and wrote articles, signed and unsigned, upon Jewish subjects for the Jewish press, besides essays on "Bar Kochba", "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow", "M. Renan and the Jews", and others for Jewish literary associations. Several of her translations from medieval Hebrew writers found a place in the ritual of American synagogues. Lazarus's most notable series of articles was that titled "An Epistle to the Hebrews" (
The American Hebrew, November 10, 1882 – February 24, 1883), in which she discussed the Jewish problems of the day, urged a technical and a Jewish education for Jews, and ranged herself among the advocates of an independent Jewish nationality and of Jewish repatriation in Palestine. Some scholars consider her to be one of the
forerunners of Zionism. The only collection of poems issued during this period was
Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems (New York, 1882), dedicated to the memory of
George Eliot. ==Death and legacy==