Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #13)

The first important American Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus is remembered above all for her classic sonnet “The New Colossus,” whose phrases (“Give me your tired, your poor.”) have become part of the American language. In this new selection of Lazarus’s work, John Hollander demonstrates that in her relatively brief life she achieved real poetic mastery in a variety of modes.

In early poems like “Phantasies” and “Symphonic Studies,” she explored fluently imagined inner landscapes suggested by the ...