POETRY // Liberty in a Folding Chair: On ‘The New Colossus,’ by Emma Lazarus, and ‘After a Greek Proverb,’ by A.E. Stallings

by Joshua Mehigan

EXCERPT //

“With the ratification in June 1215 of the Magna Carta, or Magna Carta Libertatum (‘Great Charter of Liberties’), the idea of liberty won crucial recognition as a basic political principle. After that, it was only a matter of time before thinkers got down to the business of arguing about what liberty is, and before political leaders forgot all about the principle and, from time to time, in the name of liberty, began orchestrating campaigns of oppression and murders by the hundreds of millions.

‘The New Colossus’ and ‘After a Greek Proverb,’ both of which touch the realm of political thought, are nevertheless for real people everywhere—not in the way kindergarteners learn during National Poetry Month that poems are for real people everywhere, but emphatically so, for the same reason that neither can fail to be especially interesting at the current political moment, namely that both are animated by a basic concern with individual liberty. The two poems diverge from politics into verbal art at almost opposite angles. Reading them with the kind of mindset the current political moment seems to encourage, you might conclude that the broad rhetorical art of Lazarus is aimed at romantic idealists, and the more nuanced and intimate art of Stallings at pragmatic realists. But, if you consider them together, you might chuck your intuitions about which poem suits whom best.” 

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