Emma Lazarus now bestrides Morningside Heights as well as New York harbor. Last night, at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, this poet who celebrated freedom was inducted into the American Poets’ Corner by the cathedral’s board of electors.

Lazarus is best known for her poem “The New Colossus,” which includes the immortal words engraved on a plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Composed in 1883, that sonnet has entered the public consciousness, symbolizing America as a gateway to freedom.

The poet in residence at the cathedral, Charles Martin, said Lazarus’s concern with immigrants was a timely one, and that her work disproved W.H. Auden’s assertion that poetry made nothing happen.

Mr. Martin said since her death, Lazarus’s works had been “whittled down” to that single sonnet. But in recent years she has been rediscovered, he said. He told those assembled that Lazarus, who has existed in the public eye for the past century “as an inscription,” would have been pleased that other works of hers had now been inscribed uptown.

The inscription at Poets’ Corner, drawn from her poem “Exultation,” reads: “Born from blank darkness to this blaze of beauty, /Where is thy faith, and where are thy thanksgivings?”

As the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University, John Hollander, told The New York Sun, “She was a very active literary figure in New York.”

Born in 1849 into a prosperous Sephardic Jewish family that lived north of Union Square, Lazarus summered with her family in Newport. She would not have been uncomfortable in the ecumenical setting of Poets’ Corner.

Very early in her career, Lazarus gave a copy of her first book to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered her encouragement. She dedicated her second book, “Admetus and Other Poems,” to him in 1871. She corresponded with other figures such as Henry James and Ivan Turgenev, visited Robert Browning abroad, and translated German poets such as Heinrich Heine. The title of “The New Colossus” title revisits the Colossus of Rhodes, said a professor of English at Princeton, Esther Schor, who has written a new biography called “Emma Lazarus.”

When the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El asked Emma Lazarus to contribute to a book the temple was preparing, she declined, saying she did not feel spiritually Jewish, the editor of a forthcoming anecdotal history of the family of the Lehman Brothers, Kenneth Libo, said. “Later,” Mr. Libo said, “Lazarus found her Jewish roots.” Her interest in a Jewish State was awakened after she read George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda.” Mr. Hollander said she received “a jolt” upon learning of Russian pogroms against Jews.

“She was interested in what Jewish-American identity might be for a writer,” said Mr. Hollander, who edited a volume of her selected poetry for the Library of America. At the service, Mr. Martin quoted Ms. Schor: “Lazarus spoke with a clear and prophetic fervor, telling the nation that its complexion would change along with its soul.”

She died at 38, not long after she had hit her stride, Mr. Hollander said.

How good a writer was she? Mr. Hollander began by saying that Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were “off the charts” in terms of their greatness as poets. But after Dickinson, he said he did not think there was a better American female poet of the 19th century than Lazarus.

“She educated our imagination,” said the Dean of the Cathedral, James Kowalski, who officiated at the evensong service, where Lazarus was inducted.