The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 79brutishness and inequity, of slavery. Time is also found to look back at the earlier
inhabitants of this land, the Native Americans, at their sufferings and eventual evic-
tion. But, despite Dwight’s references to “Indian woes,” his basic message is that their
removal was a necessary step in the march of progress. Sympathy for the defeated
and banished Native Americans is qualified by the clearly stated belief that they had
to give way to the better and brighter forces of civilization represented by the
pilgrims, and then later by other Anglo-Americans. For that matter, celebration of
this particular American dream is vitiated by the fact that it is conducted in such
conflicted and derivative terms. The poet endorses peace, tranquillity, but also nec-
essary, sometimes violent progress. It speaks approvingly of “Competence,” modest
sufficiency, but also, and with equal approval, of a kind of survival of the fittest. Also,
in a familiar pattern, it uses old forms to write about the new: this hymn to American
virtues and uniqueness is sung in a voice that is still definitively European.
That is just as true of the attempts Joel Barlow made at an American epic, The
Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807). Like Dwight, Barlow was a
member of a pro-Federalist group known as the “Connecticut Wits.” He traveled
and wrote extensively. His work includes a number of patriotic poems (“The
Prospect of Peace” (1778)) and poems attacking the monarchism and imperialism
of Europe (“Advice to a Raven in Russia: December, 1812” (unpublished until
1938)). His most anthologized piece is “The Hasty Pudding: A Poem in Three
Cantos” (1793), a work about home thoughts from abroad that praises Yankee
virtues by celebrating a peculiarly Yankee meal. The Columbiad, his much revised
and extended version of The Vision of Columbus, was, however, his stab at a great
work. “My object is altogether of a moral and political nature,” he announced in the
preface to his 1807 epic; “I wish to encourage and strengthen, in the rising genera-
tion, a sense of the importance of republican institutions, as being the great
foundation of public and private happiness.” “This is the moment in America to
give such a direction to poetry, painting and the other fine arts,” he added, “that
true and useful ideas of glory may be implanted in the minds of men here, to take
[the] place of the false and destructive ones that have degraded the species in other
countries.” Barlow was not the first to want to write an American epic. And by his
time the idea of announcing the new nation in the form traditionally dedicated to
such a project was becoming a commonplace. But this was the first major attempt
made to realize this ambition, shared by so many, to see something that memorial-
ized the American nation in verse just as, say, Rome and its founding had been
memorialized in the Aeneid.
The Columbiad begins in traditional epic fashion: “I sing the Mariner who first
unfurl’d / An eastern banner o’er the western world / And taught mankind where
future empires lay.” Contrary to the impression given by these opening lines,
however, Barlow does not go on to sing of the actions of Columbus but rather of the
inexorable progress of free institutions in the Americas as he anticipates them. To
Columbus, in prison, comes Hesper, the guardian genius of the western continent,
who leads him to a mount of vision. The poem then proceeds in a series of visions
of the American future, extending forward through colonial and RevolutionaryGGray_c01.indd 79ray_c 01 .indd 79 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM