By Nava Atlas | On April 20, 2019 | Updated November 16, 2024 | Comments (4)
Emma Lazarus (1849 – 1887) was an American poet, translator, and activist best remembered for “The New Colossus.” Following is a sampling of poems by Emma Lazarus, a talented and dedicated woman who deserves to be rediscovered and read.
“The New Colossus,” her most famous poem, is the 1883 sonnet that contains the iconic “lines of world-wide welcome” inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 5, 2019 | Updated December 9, 2024 | Comments (15)
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894) is one of the most enduring and beloved of Victorian romantic poets. Following is a selection of poems by Christina Rossetti from her vast body of work.
Born in London, Christina was youngest of four artistic and literary siblings, the best known of whom is the pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Her long poem “Goblin Market“ is perhaps her most famous work. She was praised by her contemporaries, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and was considered by some as the natural successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Read More→
By Skyler Gomez | On March 4, 2019 | Updated March 8, 2023 | Comments (7)
Gabriela Mistral (April 7, 1889 – January 10, 1957, born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga) was a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist. Here you can sample nine poems by Gabriela Mistral about life, love, and death, both in their original Spanish (poemas de Gabriela Mistral), and in English translation.
In 1945, Mistral became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Mistral stopped formally attending school at the age of fifteen to care for her sick mother, but continued to write poetry. Just two years later, her heart broke after the sad deaths of her lover, Romeo Ureta, and a close nephew. Read More→
By Melanie P. Kumar | On February 20, 2019 | Updated July 6, 2021 | Comments (0)
There are times when you take more interest in a poet or an author after you read her obituary. This is what happened with Meena Alexander, whom I had read in passing but devoured in great detail, especially after I heard that she had succumbed to cancer on November 21, 2018 in New York.
Meena could be termed an international poet as she was of Indian origins, born in Allahabad in 1951 and raised in Kerala, India before the family moved to Sudan.
Meena finally made the U.S. and New York City her home, where she was a professor of English and Women’s Studies at City University of New York and Hunter College. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 18, 2019 | Updated April 29, 2020 | Comments (2)
Frances Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911, also known as Frances E.W. Harper or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) was an ardent suffragist, social reformer, and abolitionist in addition to her renown as a poet and author. Here, presenting a taste of her deeply thoughtful and moving work, is a selection of poems by Frances Watkins Harper.
She wrote prolifically from the time she published her first collection of poetry in 1845, at the age of twenty. A freeborn African-American from Baltimore, Maryland, she dedicated her life to social causes, including abolition, women’s suffrage, and the quest for equality.
The dynamic Frances Harper became involved in anti-slavery societies in the early 1850s and was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Read More→
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