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Chapter 1 - The Space of Public Memory

Monuments, Memorials, and American Poetry from “The New Colossus” to Black Lives Matter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2023

Daniel Morris
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
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Summary

When W. H. Auden – thirtysomething poet, English expatriate, and new New Yorker – wrote the words “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he was mere miles from a 305-foot-tall counterexample. Poetry didn’t build the Statue of Liberty, and didn’t notably influence the statue’s French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, or the Americans who funded and built its pedestal. But “The New Colossus” (1883), a sonnet by the Jewish American poet and humanitarian Emma Lazarus, did raise $1,500 at auction for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund – not much, but for fourteen lines, not bad. In an inestimably greater contribution, “The New Colossus” prospectively transformed the statue into a monument to immigration, a “Mother of Exiles” from whose “beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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