Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-v2bm5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-26T00:34:25.353Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 1 - The Space of Public Memory

Monuments, Memorials, and American Poetry from “The New Colossus” to Black Lives Matter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2023

By
Christopher Spaide
Edited by
Daniel Morris
Daniel Morris
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
Get access

Summary

When W. H. Auden – thirtysomething poet, English expatriate, and new New Yorker – wrote the words “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he was mere miles from a 305-foot-tall counterexample. Poetry didn’t build the Statue of Liberty, and didn’t notably influence the statue’s French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, or the Americans who funded and built its pedestal. But “The New Colossus” (1883), a sonnet by the Jewish American poet and humanitarian Emma Lazarus, did raise $1,500 at auction for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund – not much, but for fourteen lines, not bad. In an inestimably greater contribution, “The New Colossus” prospectively transformed the statue into a monument to immigration, a “Mother of Exiles” from whose “beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome.”

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 , pp. 16 - 35
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Academy of American Poets. The Official Poem of the New York World’s Fair, 1939, and Other Prize Winning Poems. Bowne & Co., 1939.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. Another Time. Random House, 1940.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. Edited by Mendelson, Edward, Random House, 1977.Google Scholar
Baraka, Amiri. S O S: Poems 1961–2013. Expanded ed. Grove Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.Google Scholar
Briante, Susan. Defacing the Monument. Noemi Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Third World Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Cavitch, Max. “Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty.” American Literary History, vol. 18, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 1–28.Google Scholar
Chiasson, Dan. One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. University of Chicago Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Corral, Eduardo C. Guillotine. Graywolf Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Crane, Hart. Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Edited by Hammer, Langdon. Library of America, 2006.Google Scholar
Danto, Arthur C. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” The Nation, August 13, 1985, pp. 152–55.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methuen, 1920.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Boni and Liveright, 1922.Google Scholar
Hayden, Robert. Collected Poems. Rev. ed., edited by Glaysher, Frederick. Liveright, 1996.Google Scholar
Hellman, Geoffrey T. “Eighty-Six-Storied Pomp.” New Yorker, May 12, 1956, pp. 95–98.Google Scholar
Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by Rampersad, Arnold, associate editor Roessel, David. Vintage, 1995.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Joshua S. “‘An Atlas of the Difficult World’: Adrienne Rich’s Countermonument.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 727–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jarrell, Randall. The Complete Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.Google Scholar
Kennedy, John F. A Nation of Immigrants. Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1958.Google Scholar
Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Wesleyan University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Lai, Him Mark, Lim, Genny, and Yung, Judy, eds. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940. 2nd ed. University of Washington Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Lazarus, Emma. Selected Poems. Edited by Hollander, John. Library of America, 2005.Google Scholar
Long Soldier, Layli. WHEREAS. Graywolf Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Edited by Bidart, Frank and Gewanter, David with Harrison, DeSales. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.Google Scholar
Merrill, James. Collected Poems. Edited by McClatchy, J. D. and Yenser, Stephen. Knopf, 2004.Google Scholar
“Monument, N.” In Oxford English Dictionary, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/121852.Google Scholar
North, Michael. The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poetry. Cornell University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
O’Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Knopf, 1971.Google Scholar
Parra, Nicanor. “USA.” Translated by Patricio Lerzundi and Lynne Van Voorhis. In Antipoems: New and Selected, edited by Unger, David. New Directions, 1985, pp. 114–15.Google Scholar
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Edited by Hughes, Ted. Harper Perennial, 2008.Google Scholar
Rainey, Lawrence S. Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos. University of Chicago Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. University of Chicago Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. Collected Poems: 1950–2012. W. W. Norton, 2016.Google Scholar
Rotella, Guy. Castings: Monuments and Monumentality in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney. Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Rudman, Mark. Robert Lowell: An Introduction to the Poetry. Columbia University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Schor, Esther. “What the Trump Administration Gets Wrong about the Statue of Liberty.” New York Times, August 14, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/opinion/ken-cuccinelli-emma-lazarus.html.Google Scholar
Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. Little, Brown, 2021.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Kermode, Frank and Richardson, Joan. Library of America, 1997.Google Scholar
Strand, Mark. Collected Poems. Knopf, 2014.Google Scholar
Tate, Allen. Collected Poems, 1919–1976. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.Google Scholar
Tate, Allen. Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.Google Scholar
von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980. Harvard University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
“Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy.” Southern Poverty Law Center, February 1, 2019, www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.Google Scholar
Wilbur, Richard. Collected Poems 1943–2004. Harcourt, 2004.Google Scholar
Williams, Caroline Randall. “My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” New York Times, June 26, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html.Google Scholar
York, Jake Adam. The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry. Routledge, 2005.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×