Joel Barlow

Joel Barlow (1754–1812), a well-known poet and diplomat, was born to a farming family in Redding, Connecticut. Despite delays in his schooling caused by his parents’ deaths and the American Revolution, he graduated from Yale University as class poet in 1778, delivering his poem The Prospect of Peace at graduation. At Yale, Barlow met like-minded writers, who formed the literary society the “Connecticut Wits,” and published The Anarchiad (1786–1787), a satirical poem on the partisan debates over the Constitution. Barlow earned a master’s degree in theology in 1779 and served as a chaplain in Massachusetts from 1780–1783. He married his wife, Ruth, in 1781, and the two had a devoted relationship, often corresponding through letters when apart. Barlow’s first major published work was The Vision of Columbus (1787), an epic poem of roughly five thousand lines that traces the origins of the country and ultimately celebrates America as a prosperous place. Barlow aimed to create a distinctly American literary tradition and aspired to be the nation’s poet. While Barlow was certainly patriotic, he was also quite cosmopolitan. In 1788, he traveled to Europe to sell tracts of land for the Scioto Land Company. However, the company was fraudulent, and Barlow ended up in the middle of a controversy. While in Europe, he became involved with a number of political radicals, including Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Joseph Priestley, and his own political ideas began to shift. Over the course of his time in Europe, Barlow published several radical republican pieces, including A Letter to the National Convention of France (1791) and Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792–1793). After being bestowed honorary French citizenship, Barlow unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the French National Assembly in 1793. In 1796, as an American diplomat at Algiers, Barlow played a key role in negotiating the Treaty of Tripoli to end Barbary pirate attacks in North Africa. He returned to the United States in 1804 and worked on revising The Vision of Columbus into a longer work, The Columbiad (1807). Since Barlow wanted the poem to represent the glory of the country, he had it published in very elaborate and costly volumes. Barlow’s stay in the country was short-lived, as he became a minister to France in 1811, tasked with negotiating a peace treaty with Napoleon. Barlow traveled through Europe in difficult conditions, attempting to complete his task, but ended up dying of pneumonia.