“Lady Lazarus” doesn’t have a specific, concrete setting. However, the speaker makes several references to contemporary events that help locate the poem in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. For one thing, the speaker alludes to the Holocaust at both the beginning and the end of the poem. When the speaker describes her skin as being “bright as a Nazi lampshade” (line 5), she’s referring to a rumor that circulated throughout the United States in the years following the Second World War. According to this rumor, the Nazis used the skins of Jewish victims to make lampshades. Later in the poem, the speaker addresses her doctor in German and imagines herself being burned to ash, just like those who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. These references definitively locate the poem in the postwar years. The speaker’s evident frustration with women’s status as second-class citizens also helps situate the poem in the mid-twentieth century. In the U.S. context, the feminist movement began to gain momentum in the early 1960s. The speaker’s bitterly ironic references to being objectified and disempowered by a male-dominated society therefore suggests that the poem is specifically set in 1960s America.