The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume 2 by the American poet born in New York City, Emma Lazarus.She is best known for "The New Colossus", a sonnet written in 1883; its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty installed in 1903, a decade and a half after Lazarus's death.Lazarus wrote her own important poems and edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine.