Who wrote the poem 'The New Colossus'?

The poem The New Colossus was written by American poet Emma Lazarus. She composed the sonnet in 1883 to help raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, then known as Liberty Enlightening the World.

Lazarus’s poem reimagines the statue as a welcoming figure rather than a conqueror. Its title contrasts the statue with the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The poem’s message emphasizes refuge, immigration, and the arrival of newcomers at New York Harbor.

The New Colossus was placed on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in 1903, sixteen years after Lazarus’s death. That later association made the sonnet inseparable from the monument, although it was not part of the statue’s original design. A common mix-up is to attribute it to Walt Whitman or another nineteenth-century American poet; Lazarus is the poem’s author.