The raison d’être of “The New Colossus”

Combining textual analysis, cultural contextualization, and the history of ideas, this essay excavates the complex “literal sense” of Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet, “The New Colossus.” Beginning with the deliberate misreading of the statue’s intended and acknowledged signification and noting the poem’s network of contrarieties, the essay dwells on the contrast between the “wretched refuse” on Ward’s Island and decadent Gilded Age exhibition where the poem was first read; it goes on to argue that the poem disables the connection between progress and poverty, reinvigorates the rhetoric of asylum, points to the Hebraic roots of American history, and reimagines American modernity as a benign merging of contrarieties.