Who wrote the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal?

Emma Lazarus wrote the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal.

Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883, a sonnet created to help raise money for the statue’s pedestal. Unlike the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, which symbolized military power, Lazarus’s “new” colossus is a welcoming female figure she called the “Mother of Exiles.” That language helped shape the statue’s later association with immigrants arriving in the United States.

The poem was not engraved on the pedestal immediately. In 1903, nearly two decades after the statue’s 1886 dedication, its text was cast onto a bronze plaque and installed inside the pedestal. The plaque remains part of the monument’s interpretive history.

Lazarus was an American poet from a prominent Sephardic Jewish family and wrote extensively about Jewish refugees and persecution. A common mistake is to assume the poem was part of Bartholdi’s original sculpture design; Bartholdi designed the statue, while Lazarus supplied the later literary message that became inseparable from its meaning.