The Columbiad

The Columbiad (1807) is a philosophical epic poem by the American diplomat and man of letters Joel Barlow. It grew out of Barlow's earlier poem The Vision of Columbus (1787). Intended as a national epic for the United States it was popular with the reading public for a few years, and was compared with Homer, Virgil and Milton, but it has since been for the most part dismissed as an overblown and tedious failure.

The Columbiad had its origins in The Vision of Columbus, a philosophical poem begun in 1780 and continued through Barlow's service as a military chaplain in the American Revolutionary War. A hymn of praise to America written in nine books, The Vision of Columbus took the form of a dialogue between Christopher Columbus and an angel. Its panoramic range includes the whole history of both North and South America, and culminates in the Revolutionary War and the glorious post-Revolutionary future of the United States. In tone the poem is overtly Christian, and is coloured by Barlow's political sympathies, which were then Federalist. It was published in 1787 by subscription, the subscribers including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Louis XVI of France.The Vision of Columbus enjoyed an enormous success with the American reading public, establishing him as the leading poet of his country, and it attracted admiration in France and England.

Over the next 20 years Barlow laboriously reworked The Vision, eventually expanding it from 4700 lines to 8350, building up a huge apparatus of prefaces and footnotes, and so altering the whole tenor of the work that it bore little resemblance to the original. Barlow's religious convictions turned to scepticism, while in politics he became a liberal democrat, and these changes were reflected in the poem. His hopes for the future of America were pinned on a new holy trinity of "equality, free election, and federal band", which would bring about a new age of artistic and scientific advance.The Columbiad shows human history reaching its climax in the formation of a world council in Mesopotamia, the delegates to which have thrown aside the symbols of their religious faith. Barlow wrote that the object of his poem was "to inculcate the love of rational liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence and war".

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