The Poetry of Emma Lazarus: 'Floating like dreams, and melting silently''

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22nd, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family, the fourth of seven children.

Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. As a young child she developed an interest in poetry, writing her first verses at age eleven.

The Civil War propelled her verse forward and her collection ‘Poems and Translations’, written between the ages of ...