What Does the Plaque on the Statue of Liberty Read
The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty
Emma Lazarus'southward Petrarchan sonnet is an awkward vehicle for defenses of American greatness—perhaps because then many of those who quote it miss its true significant.
The words of Emma Lazarus's famous 1883 sonnet "The New Colossus" take seemed more visible since Donald Trump'south election. They tin be found on the news and on posters, in tweets and in the streets. Lines 10 and eleven of the poem are quoted with the most frequency—"Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe gratuitous"—and oft by those aiming to highlight a contrast betwixt Lazarus's humanitarian vision of the nation and the president'southward racist rhetoric.
Later on reports that Trump had described Haiti, El salvador, and African nations equally "shithole countries," the former FBI director James Comey tweeted a bit of the sonnet, along with his interpretation of its meaning:
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to exhale costless, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I elevator my lamp beside the golden door!" This country's greatness and true genius lies in its multifariousness.
— James Comey (@Comey) January 12, 2018
Several other public citations of Lazarus assume that her poem is reducible to a message about the value of variety. Comey's tweet echoes Nancy Pelosi's interpretation from early on 2017: "You lot know the rest. It's a statement of values of our country. Information technology's a recognition that the force of our country is in its diversity, that the revitalization … of America comes from our immigrant population." For Comey, variety is greatness. For Pelosi, multifariousness is both the existing forcefulness of America and its source of revitalization. To marshal Lazarus's poem in support of a redefinition of American greatness, nevertheless, is to capitulate to the terms of Trump's exceptionalism—and to ignore the poem's own radical imagination of hospitality.
A little like Robert Frost's "The Route Not Taken," published in 1916, "The New Colossus" is one of those poems that is constantly rediscovered and recontextualized. Whether the popularity of "The New Colossus" is a consequence of the poem'south 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 ascertain the terms of U.S. and European political soapbox.
The story of the verse form's cosmos has circulated almost every bit widely as the lines of Lazarus's verse form. The Jewish Lazarus was a prolific writer in multiple genres, a political activist, a translator, and an associate of tardily-19th-century literati—including Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell. She wrote the sonnet, after some persuasion by friends, for an auction to raise coin for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But the details of the poem's production and of its author'due south biography do non fully capture the conditions under which the poem emerged, weather condition that help to explicate the poem's bulletin to its immiserated masses.
"The New Colossus" emerges at a pivotal moment in history. The twelvemonth before Lazarus's poem was read at the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition in New York, in 1883, the Chinese Exclusion Act became the first federal law that limited immigration from a particular group. Though set to last for 10 years, various extensions and additions made the law permanent until 1943. The year afterwards Lazarus'due south poem was read, the European countries met in Berlin to divide up the African continent into colonies. "The New Colossus" stands at the intersection of U.S. immigration policy and European colonialism, well before the physical Statue of Liberty was dedicated. The liberal sentiments of Lazarus'due south sonnet cannot be separated from these developments in geopolitics and commercialism.
The poem's peculiar ability comes non simply from its themes of hospitality but likewise from the Italian sonnet grade that contains them. A Petrarchan sonnet is an awkward vehicle for defenses of American greatness. Historically, the epic poem has been the type of poetry best suited to nationalist projects, considering its narrative establishes a "storied pomp" in literature that has yet to be in the world. The sonnet, in contrast, is a flexible, traveling form, i that moved from Italy to England. It is more at dwelling house in the conversations, translations, and negotiations betwixt national literatures than in the cosmos or renewal of national eminence.
U.S. poets across the 20th century, from Claude McKay to Gwendolyn Brooks to Jack Agüeros, have turned to the sonnet for a critique of American greatness rather than a liberal redefinition of it. These poets, in sonnets such every bit McKay's "The White City," Brooks's "A Lovely Love," and Agüeros's Sonnets From the Puerto Rican, expose that greatness as being predicated on the slavery, denigration, and exploitation of colonial, African American, and Latinx subjects. This hard, "high literary" form, ostensibly the property of a white European elite, has get one of the available tools to take autonomously the racism of gild and the ravages of a global economy. To place Lazarus in that lineage is to see her poem as something more than a competing vision of American greatness, as Comey and others would accept it.
In the afterlife of Lazarus'southward poems, the words that the statue cries out in the sestet—the final six lines of the poem—accept often been treated equally though they were identical to the voice speaking the remainder of the poem. They are, however, the imagined phonation of a figure within the poem. Over the 14 lines of the sonnet, the poem moves from making a negative comparison to the Colossus of Rhodes to animating the "new Colossus" with a voice, an case of what literary critics phone call personification or, to utilize the more unwieldy term, prosopopoeia:
Not like the brazen behemothic of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from country to land;
Here at our sea-done, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her buoy-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild optics command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to exhale complimentary,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
What the poem does, through its shifts in figurative linguistic communication from comparing to personification, is but as important as what it says explicitly. Rather than continuing guard, or extending open arms, the "Mother of Exiles"—a gendered, racialized effigy—cries out with its "silent lips." The difference, and then, is not only in what this Colossus represents—its liberal values of hospitality, diversity, and inclusion—simply too in the speaking figure that the poem creates. The sonnet ends by compelling its readers to hear this invitation. Information technology is a response that anticipates the cries of disease that it knows are coming.
The philosopher Simone Weil argues that the impersonal cry of "Why am I being hurt?" accompanies claims to human rights. To pass up to hear this cry of disease, Weil continues, is the gravest injustice i might do to some other. The vocalization of the statue in Lazarus'south verse form can almost be heard as an uncanny respond, avant la lettre, to one of the slogans chanted by immigrants and refugees around the world today: "We are hither because you were there." The statue's cry is a response to 1 version of Weil's "Why am I being injure" that specifies the global relation between the arrival of immigrants and the expansion of the colonial system.
The weep of the tired, poor, and huddled heard by Lazarus's poem is manifest today within the poetry written and recited by women exiles, freedom fighters, imprisoned activists, and detainees. "A Female Cry," by the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, asserts the right, non to resources, simply to something more than than an adaptation by the existing system. Here are the final two stanzas of the poem:
O my dream, kidnapped from my younger years
Silence has ravaged u.s.a.
Our tears have become a body of water
Our patience has bored of us
Together, we rise upwards for sure
Whatever it was we wanted to exist.
So allow'southward go
Raise upwardly a weep
In the face of those shadowy ghosts.
For how long, O burn down within,
Will you scorch my breast with tears?
And how long, O scream,
Will y'all remain in the hearts of women!
Tatour demands more than patience and tears, of which she has more than plenty; she calls for an uprising on behalf of "any it was we wanted to exist." Tatour's addresses—to dream, fire, and scream—are the addresses of the genuinely tired, poor, and huddled (as well as detained and imprisoned) rather than those of the model liberal subject. The colossal weep has outburst its sonnet's narrow cell: It appears equally one possible form in which the poetry of a global uprising anticipates and prefigures the moment of revolution itself.
Pelosi and Comey, yet distinct they are every bit political figures, quote Lazarus to support a liberal narrative of American exceptionalism, based on multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion. However the commonage, immiserated masses invited and welcomed past these lines are tired, poor, and huddled—and at odds with the empowered, individualized "hard worker" that Comey and others reproduce every bit the ideal image of the immigrant.
It is not that people shouldn't exist best-selling for their difficult work, of grade; it's but that that shouldn't be the most relevant criterion for the performance of political and economic justice. The language of diversity and inclusion has go one of the prominent means past which the nation currently manages its political and economic crises by seizing the power of moving bodies as homo majuscule. If the justification for managing borders relies entirely on the recitation of liberal values—however necessary it may be to go along to assert them in the midst of their relentless negation—there is no guarantee that "liberty" will be fully realized.
Lazarus'south poem begins by repudiating the greatness to which Comey summons the poem every bit witness. It continues with a denial of nationalist narratives that are based on historical claims of aboriginal possession: "Keep, aboriginal lands, your storied pomp!"
What might be more important than the values that the New Colossus speaks—ethical claims to rights, liberty, and hospitality that, despite their reiteration, have inappreciably succeeded in preventing the worst violence of the late 19th and 20th centuries—is the silence that the poem refuses. And to hear this silence is to read the poem's sonnet as voicing a weep that those who passionately recite its words, from Pelosi to Comey, as well as those who violently deny them, might well train themselves to hear.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-story-behind-the-poem-on-the-statue-of-liberty/550553/
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