The New Colossus

“The New Colossus” aligns with a number of poetic traditions. As a sonnet, it follows in the footsteps of Petrarch, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and many others. As an occasional poem, one might compare it to the likes of Pindar’s odes, Milton’s

Lycidas, or Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” As an ekphrastic poem, which is a poem written about another work of art, it follows a line from the Iliad’s description of the shield of Achilles, Ovid’s tale of the tapestries of Minerva and Arachne in Metamorphoses to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But perhaps the most interesting literary point of comparison with Lazarus’s poem is with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818).

Like “The New Colossus,” “Ozymandias” is a sonnet, though its rhyme scheme is unconventional. Also, like Lazarus’s poem, Shelley’s describes a colossal statue, this one of the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. However, where Lazarus presents an earnest celebration of a mighty figure, Shelley ironically depicts how the mighty have fallen. Specifically, the great statue the poem depicts is in ruins, consisting of “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” (Line 2) and a “shattered visage” that is “Half sunk” (Line 4) in the desert sand.