Elizabeth Barrett Browning originally published "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" in the second volume of Charles Dickens's Household Words. The poem considers The Greek Slave, a statue sculpted by American artist Hiram Powers, with whom she and Robert Browning were acquainted and near-neighbors in Florence. Because the statue was, at the time of the poem's inception, being displayed across the U.S. and Britain, it is likely that EBB saw a model cast of the statue for herself at Powers's studio in early 1847. "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" is the fourth of the five poems EBB wrote about slavery and is primarily responsible for shifting the statue's popular context away from that of the Greek War of Independence that had initially inspired Powers' work and towards broader questions of morality surrounding slavery abroad in the United States.