Born at Reading, Conn., 1754: died near Cracow, Poland, Dec. 24, 1812. An American poet and politician, one of the “Hartford Wits.” He resided abroad, chiefly in France, 1788–1805, where he identified himself with the Girondist party; was consul to Algiers 1795–97; and was United States minister to France 1811–12. Author of “The Vision of Columbus” (1787: enlarged as “The Columbiad,” 1807), “Hasty Pudding,” and “Advice to the Privileged Orders” (Part I. 1791, Part II. 1795).

Personal

  In private life, our author was highly esteemed for his amiable temperament, and many social excellences. His manners were generally grave and dignified, and he possessed but little facility of general conversation; but with his intimate friends he was easy and familiar, and upon topics which deeply interested him he conversed with much animation. His mind was rather of a philosophical than a poetical cast, and better adapted to those studies which require patient investigation and profound thought than to the lighter and more fanciful labors of the Muse. Still, as a poet, he held no humble place among the authors of his day; while, as an ardent patriot, a sincere philanthropist, a zealous republican, and a friend and patron of science and art, he must ever stand among the most distinguished men of his age and country.

  We had in Paris at this period a few Americans…. In order to reach the apartment of Mr. Barlow, I was obliged to pass through the door of a great gambling establishment that occupied the floor immediately below his. This door was attended by a porter, who kept it locked, so that to get admittance I had to announce myself as a visitor to Mr. Barlow. A man ought to be cheaply lodged to be induced to reside behind such a barrier. The poet’s poverty consented rather than his will. Barlow was a very estimable man, and I am happy to say that prosperous circumstances soon removed him from this attic prison to comfortable quarters, and a few years after he was enabled to display the suitable magnificence of an ambassador in one of the best hotels in the city when he represented our republic at Bonaparte’s court.

  The life of Joel Barlow is still unwritten. Political prejudice may have something to do with this, but to one who has pored over his private papers, read the letters written to him, by him, and about him, by all the celebrated people of his time, there is something ludicrous in opening an Encyclopædia and reading “Joel Barlow was an American poet.” Barlow was a poor poet, but a very great man, and so posterity will one day rate him. Impracticable he may have been, for his wishes and aspirations were far before the possibilities of his time; yet in hurrying to Wilna, that he might force from the reluctant Napoleon some acknowledgement of the rights and sufferings of impoverished American citizens, he laid down his life for his people as deliberately as if, like Warren, he had exposed it upon the first battle-field. The record of the terrible privations and sufferings which led to his death in a peasant’s hut near Zarnovitch, Dec. 26, 1812, still survives, and will one day justify my words.

  Barlow left Paris for Wilna on the 26th of October in his private carriage, yet travelling night and day and with relays of horses at the post-towns to expedite his progress…. The perilous journey had been made in vain, and the treaty was doomed to still further delay. It now only remained for Barlow to extricate himself from his dangerous position and to reach the frontiers before the fleeing army and the pursuing Cossacks should close every avenue of escape…. On reaching Zarrow, an obscure village near Cracow, the poet was seized with a sudden and fatal attack of pneumonia, the result, no doubt, of privation and exposure. He was borne to a little Jewish cottage, the only inn that the village afforded, and there died December 26, 1812. His remains were interred in the little churchyard of the village where he died. It is rarely that an American visits his grave, and the government has never taken interest enough in its minister to erect a memorial slab above his dust: but wifely devotion has supplied the omission, and a plain monument of marble, on which are inscribed his name, age and station and the circumstances of his death, marks the poet’s place of sepulture.

  This Barlow is memorable as the only one of our countrymen who has been guilty of the folly of attempting to produce an American epic poem. But a better title to immortality is the infamous part he bore in enticing innocent Frenchmen to buy and settle the lands of the Scioto Company on the Ohio. Towards Adams, Barlow felt the same contempt which any man who admires poetry must feel towards the scribbler who defiled the English language by writing the “Columbiad,” and, when he heard that John Adams was chosen President he poured out his thoughts on the political position in a letter to Abraham Baldwin, a brother-in-law and a Member of Congress. The letter abounded in obscure passages, but the one selected by the prosecutors of Lyon contained an expression of surprise that the answer of the House to the President’s speech of April third, 1797, had not been “an order to send him to a mad-house.”

The Columbiad, 1787–1807

  America.—An epic poet has already appeared in that hemisphere, Barlow, author of the “Columbiad,”—not to be compared with the works of more polished nations.

  The author’s talents are evidently respectable; and, severely as we have been obliged to speak of his taste and his diction in a great part of the volume, we have no hesitation in saying, that we consider him as a giant, in comparison with many of the puling and paltry rhymsters, who disgrace our English literature by their occasional success. As an Epic poet, we do think his case is desperate; but, as a philosophical and moral poet, we think he has talents of no ordinary value; and, if he would pay some attention to purity of style, and simplicity of composition, and cherish in himself a certain fastidiousness of taste,—which is not yet to be found, we are afraid, even among the better educated of the Americans,—we have no doubt that he might produce something which English poets would envy, and English critics applaud. In the meantime, we think it quite certain, that his present work will have no success in this country. Its faults are far too many, and too glaring, to give its merits any chance of being distinguished; and indeed no long poem was ever redeemed by the beauty of particular passages—especially if its faults were owing to affectation, and its beauties addressed rather to the judgment than to the heart or the imagination.

  The “Columbiad” is not, in our opinion, so pleasing a poem in its present form as in that in which it was originally written…. Barlow, in his later poetry, attempted to invigorate his style, but, instead of drawing strength and salubrity from the pure wells of ancient English, he corrupted and debased it with foreign infusions. The imposing but unchaste glitter which distinguished the manner of Darwin and his imitators, appears likewise to have taken strong hold on his fancy, and he has not scrupled to bestow on his poem much of this meretricious decoration. But, notwithstanding the bad taste in which his principal work is composed, notwithstanding he cannot be said to write with much pathos or many of the native felicities of fancy, there is yet enough in the poetry of Mr. Barlow to prove that, had he fixed his eye on purer models, he might have excelled, not indeed in epic or narrative poetry nor in the delineation of passion and feeling, but in that calm, lofty, sustained style, which suits best with topics of morality and philosophy, and for which the vigor and spirit of his natural manner, whenever he permits it to appear, show him to have been well qualified.

  The strangest epic composition ever issued from the press.

  The poem, having no unity of fable, no regular succession of incidents, no strong exhibition of varied character, lacks the most powerful charms of a narrative; and has, besides, many dull and spiritless passages, that would make unpopular a work of much more faultless general design. The versification is generally harmonious, but mechanical and passionless, the language sometimes incorrect, and the similes often inappropriate and inelegant. Yet there are in it many bursts of eloquence and patriotism, which should preserve it from oblivion. The descriptions of nature and of personal character are frequently condensed and forceful; and passages of invective, indignant and full of energy.

  It may safely be affirmed that there is more genuine poetry in the bare conception of the Columbiad than is to be found in all the works of many pretentious bards of considerable note; and our author may well be pardoned for some imperfections in the execution of his plan.

  It is composed in a florid, declamatory style, and has little real poetic merit to recommend it.

  All the poets of the United States were threatened with extinction or subordination when Joel Barlow appeared. He was, according to all accounts, an estimable man, cursed with the idea not only that he was a poet, but the greatest of American poets; and in 1808 he published, in a superb quarto volume, “The Columbiad.” It was also published in Paris and London. The London “Monthly Magazine” tried to prove not only that it was an epic poem, but that it was surpassed only by the Iliad, the Æneid, and “Paradise Lost.” Joel Barlow is fairly entitled to the praise of raising mediocrity to dimensions almost colossal. “Columbia is, thank Heaven, still alive;” “The Columbiad” is, thank Heaven, hopelessly dead. There are some elderly gentlemen still living who declare that they have read “The Columbiad,” and have derived much satisfaction from the perusal of the same; but their evidence cannot stand the test of cross-examination. They cannot tell what the poem is, what it teaches, and what it means. No critic within the last fifty years has read more than a hundred lines of it, and even this effort of attention has been a deadly fight with those merciful tendencies in the human organization which softly wrap the overworked mind in the blessedness of sleep. It is the impossibility of reading “The Columbiad” which prevents any critical estimate of its numberless demerits.

  Belton.  Did you ever read Barlow’s “Columbiad,” the great epic of the American Revolution?
  Mallett.  All of it? Gott bewahr! I have read a good deal of it, however, in pure amusement, but it has all gone out of my memory. But there is no foolishness which is not to be found in verse, and there is no verse so bad that it does not find readers.

  Better would it have been, both for the poem and for the poet, if, in his later revision of the work, he had attempted no change in its essential character…. Of course, never upon any plan could the poem have taken the rank as a work of genius, or have escaped the penalties of the author’s great literary defects. Under any character, it would have had no tender or delicate qualities, no lightness of touch, no flashes of beauty, not a ripple of humor, no quiet and dainty charm; a surfeit, rather, of vehemence and proclamation,—sonorous, metallic, rhetorical; forced description, manufactured sentiment, sublimity generated of pasteboard and starch; and ever-rolling tattoo of declamation, invective, eulogy; big, gaudy flowers of poetry which are also flowers of wax. Moreover, not even genius could have saved this poem from the literary disaster involved in its adoption of that conventional poetic diction and of that worn-out metrical form from which, after a whole century of favor, English literature was just then turning away in a recoil of weariness and disgust. And yet, with all his limitations as a poet, the author of “The Columbiad” is entitled to the praise due to a sturdy and effective ethical teacher in verse. In didactic expression, the poem is often epigrammatic, trenchant, and strong; nay, in strenuous moral expositions and enforcement, it is at times even noble and impressive.

  From a literary point of view, however, it ranks among the curiosities of American literature. There are here and there beautiful passages, but the poem is unwieldy, full of digressions and curious expressions.

  Barlow’s epic was thus a great and serious labor, into which he put his life-thought; but unfortunately it is a serious labor for the reader too…. In brief, “The Columbiad” is a stage-coach epic, lumbering and slow. It is valuable chiefly as a courageous attempt at greater things in American literature; and it failed, not because its author had no talent (for he had a great deal), but because epics demand genius.

  Even in its first form this turgid epic, which few mortals now living have more than glanced at, was the most ambitious attempt at serious literature which had appeared in the United States. To this day, furthermore, a quarto edition of “The Columbiad” is among the most impressive books to look at in the world.

The Hasty Pudding

  The most amusing and, perhaps, upon the whole, the most popular poem he ever composed, “Hasty-pudding,” a mock heroic in three cantos, which no genuine Yankee ever read or ever can read without interest…. In the whole poem, there is such a commingling of stately, grandiloquent diction, and ludicrous, rustic simplicity, as constitutes the soul of wit, and the attention of the reader is enchained from the beginning to the end.

  Of Barlow the poet a good deal may be said. He sought to build his eternal fame on “The Columbiad,” an epic, but by the irony of fate he is known in literature only by an unambitious poem on hasty pudding…. Deserves a rank among mock heroics and pastorals, and every New Englander ought to read it occasionally. The bard had the national fondness for the national dish, and after seeking it in the old world for many years in vain, suddenly unpromised joy expands his heart to meet it in Savoy. His soul is soothed, his cares have found an end. He greets his long lost, unforgotten friend, and makes both self and friend forever famous. Still no part of “The Hasty Pudding,” or any of Barlow’s poems, has proved sufficiently worthy to gain a place in any of the popular collections of poetry.

General

  The critic, after a careful analysis of the character of Joel Barlow, would probably rank him, first, as philanthropist; second, as statesman; third, as Philosopher; and fourth, as poet. His philanthropy crops out in every line of his writings, in every act of his life. His letters to Washington, to the citizens of the United States, to Monroe, while abroad on the French mission, and his Fourth of July oration at Washington, give evidence of broad and liberal statesmanship. His philosophical turn was most apparent in his private letters and intercourse with familiar friends. As a poet he was certainly respectable. His “Hasty-Pudding” would be an addition to any literature, and in all his poems are passages that show the inspiration of the true poet. It is as the pioneer of American poetry, however, that he is worthy of the highest honor. He was not a voluminous writer.