It is such a pleasure when poets turn their attention to biography. Biography, by and large, is not a genre heralded for its stylists. The subject, not the style, subsumes life-writing. Hence reviewers usually do no better than to spill the contents of a biography on the page, often assuming an air of authority that they filched from the very books they are reviewing.

Biographers are complicit in this degradation of their work because they fail to establish their own voices. Esther Schor has provided a signal service to biography by beginning “Emma Lazarus” (Schocken/Nextbook, 368 pages, $21.95) with a prologue, “Emma Lazarus and the Three Anne Franks.” The threesome turns out to consist of young girls who dressed up as Anne Frank for a school event. The whole affair reminds Ms. Schor of a gift from her parents, a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, which they had inscribed for her: “Here is a young girl we would like you to know.”

What better way to justify biography? Just as Anne is known for her diary, so Lazarus is known for one poem, “The New Colossus,” engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, where it welcomes the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” With consummate care and grace, Ms. Schor writes, “Here, at last, is Emma Lazarus, a being, not a poem. Here is a woman I would like you to know.”

That intimate tone pervades this biography written by a poet about a poet, a Jew writing about what used to be called a Jewess, famous in her time not merely for one poem but for many poems, as well as drama, criticism, and journalism. Lazarus never married. She also seemed inordinately fascinated with “Boston marriages” — the euphemism of the time for women living in same-sex partnerships. “The questions you and I are asking now — was there a lesbian liaison? Were there lesbian longings? And if so, for whom? — were questions she knew we would raise.” The literalist biographer cannot answer the question, but Esther Schor the poet can: “Her answer is here: within the poem itself. She wrote the poem [“Assurance”] as a dream vision and left it undated not to elude us but to redirect us. … ‘Assurance’ is not a poem about choosing a lover; it is about being chosen by desire — erotic desire, and for the body and soul of a woman. It is a love poem, yes, but also a poem of vocation, about being called by eros to a vital, sexual life.”The poet-biographer respects the experience of the poem, which is a part of the poet’s life, to be sure, but is also a kind of memorandum of the life that is not to be desecrated by bootless speculation.

The daughter of a prominent Sephardic New York family, Lazarus (1849–1887) died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 38. A precocious poet, she befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson and other important writers in this country and abroad. She began as a rather conventional writer, an imitator of European styles but transformed herself into the first Jewish American author, “arriving at a more radical, embracing vision of American society … led there by her Jewish commitment to repair a broken world.”

Ms. Schor’s exquisite evocation of Lazarus’s bifurcated identity is amply supported by the poems the biographer appends to the volume. Her own compact commentary constantly led me back to the poems, wishing to have more of what the biographer introduces with such delicacy.

The “broken world” resulted, in part, from Russian pogroms that drove a generation of Jews to New York City. A secular Jew, Lazarus nevertheless believed in the integrity of the Jewish spiritual life, boldly rejecting any notion that Christianity held values that could not be found in Jewish traditions.

“The Dance to Death,” Lazarus’s searing play, explores anti-Semitism through a complex of diverse characters and culminates in Prior Peppercorn’s outcry:

Jews, said I? when I meant Jews, Jewesses,
And Jewlings! All betwixt the age
Of twenty-four hours, and of fivescore years.
Of either sex, of every known degree,
All the contaminating vermin purged
With one clean, searching blast of wholesome fire.

I thought immediately of the Holocaust, but Ms. Schor has an even more encompassing point to make:

The great power of ‘The Dance to Death’ is not to prophesy flames to come — whether soon, in Russian pogroms, or later, rising from Nazi ovens. It is the dramatist’s power to see, and make visible, ancient flames; the poet’s power to make us feel, in ancient flames, a modern pain.

Even so, Lazarus was a Jewish prophet wedded to the word. She called herself a “Jewish outlaw,” indicating an estrangement from both gentile and Jewish communities. But that estrangement was also an embrace. In Jewish nationalism she discovered a sense of her own universality. That may seem paradoxical, especially to those who regard nationalism as a negative energy in the modern world. But Lazarus aligned herself with George Eliot and her Zionist novel, “Daniel Deronda.” “Like Eliot,” Ms. Schor writes, “she [Lazarus] believed that nationalism was a spiritual influence, one that would gradually guide individuals toward a universal humanism.”

Lazarus’s work, in the end, was a “brief for Judaism as opposition to injustice, as the spirit of freedom, as unceasing revolution. Judaism as a prophecy of America. Here was her hard-won answer to the demand that Jews assimilate to America: to assimilate America to Judaism.” How welcome Lazarus would be in the company of today’s poets. How fine it is to have a writer of Ms. Schor’s quality restore this courageous and important poet to her rightful place.

crollyson@nysun.com