![]() Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, Lazarus’s poems appeared in mass-circulation American magazines. Her only novel, Alide (1874), based on Goethe’s autobiographical writings, focuses on Goethe’s spurning of a country woman to fulfill his “sacred office.” In 1876, Lazarus privately published The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama about father-daughter incest. Lazarus never publicly criticized either her father or Emerson, but she would ponder the prerogatives of powerful male figures in her works of the 1870s. This call for a new, authentically American literature, was a theme to which Lazarus would return in an 1881 essay heralding “fresh vitality in every direction.” Here she drew attention to the voices of regionalists, Jewish writers, the scandalous Walt Whitman, and indigenous voices, which Lazarus versified in “The Creation of Man,” a Miwok myth of creation. ![]() This poem echoes in form and meter Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” but where Longfellow’s meditation closes with “the dead nations never rise again,” Lazarus concludes by announcing that “the sacred shrine is holy yet.” Another poem in the volume, “How Long,” proclaims the need for a “yet unheard of strain” suitable to prairies, plains, wilderness, and snow-peaked mountains. ![]() A letter from Emerson’s daughter, Ellen, records that Lazarus told her that she had been raised “to keep the law,” including Yom Kippur and Passover, but that now her family were “outlawed,” though “Christian institutions” did not interest her either.Īdmetus and Other Poems includes “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport,” the first poem in which Lazarus explored the experience of her Sephardic ancestors. Two years later, learning that Emerson was suffering from dementia, Lazarus visited the Emerson family in Concord, Massachusetts. Lazarus, humiliated and wounded, responded with an angry letter, which went unanswered but was among Emerson’s papers at his death. In 1871, when she published Admetus and Other Poems, she dedicated the title poem “To My Friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Despite his admiration, Emerson declined to include Lazarus’s poetry in his 1874 anthology, Parnassus, though he did include other women writers such as Harriet Prescott Spofford and Julia C.R. During the early years of their relationship, Lazarus turned to Emerson as her mentor, and he in turn praised and encouraged her writing. ![]() The two corresponded until Emerson’s death in 1882. Soon after Poems and Translations was published, Lazarus met Ralph Waldo Emerson. An augmented version of the volume, dedicated “To My Father,” was commercially published the following year. Her father, a successful sugar merchant, supported her writing by publishing, when she was only seventeen, Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen (1866). She grew up in New York City and was educated by private tutors with whom she studied mythology, music, American poetry, European literature, German, French, and Italian. Lyons, served for nearly forty years as chazzan and spiritual leader. Her ancestors had been founders both of the Touro synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and of the Sephardic Shearith Israel synagogue in New York, where her uncle, J. Born on July 22, 1849, Emma Lazarus was the fourth of Esther (Nathan) and Moses Lazarus’s seven children.
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