"The New Colossus" is a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–1887). She wrote the poem in 1883 to raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, the poem was cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level.
Emma Lazarus's manuscript for "The New Colossus"
Statue of Liberty in New York City
Bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty with the text of the poem
The poem references the Colossus of Rhodes in the lines: "... the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land."
A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, and the Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him then spread the form to the mainland. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, but only after being translated into Tuscan dialect.
The first five sonnets of Petrarch's Il Canzoniere
The title page of the first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets
D. G. Rossetti's illuminated description of the sonnet, 1880
Mary Ellen Solt's concrete "Moonshot sonnet" (1964)
