Joel Barlow

Who Was Joel Barlow?

Joel Barlow was one of the Connecticut Wits — a group of Yale-educated poets who attempted, in the years immediately following the American Revolution, to create a distinctly American literary tradition worthy of the new republic. Born in Redding, Connecticut, educated at Yale, he served as an army chaplain during the Revolution and spent much of his subsequent life in Europe as a diplomat and political writer, becoming a close friend of Thomas Paine and absorbing the rationalist and Deist ideas of the French Enlightenment.

His major work, The Vision of Columbus (1787), later revised and expanded as The Columbiad (1807), was the most ambitious American epic poem of the founding era — a sweeping narrative in which Columbus, imprisoned in Spain, is shown a vision of the future greatness of the Americas by an angelic figure. The poem is a monument of Enlightenment optimism: its presiding conviction is that reason, freedom, and education will produce a civilization of perpetual progress and peace.

Barlow is a figure of considerable interest for TLA not because his work is great — it is competent but not inspired — but because it represents so perfectly the founding era’s attempt to construct a secular eschatology: a vision of the future that does the work of hope without the content of the gospel.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Vision of Columbus — 1787 — epic poem
• The Columbiad — 1807 — expanded revision
• Advice to the Privileged Orders — 1792–1793 — political prose
• Hasty Pudding — 1793 — comic poem