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Joel Barlow's Columbiad: A Bicentennial Reading Steven Blakemore Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2007 vii, 384 pp.
No early American work, perhaps no major work in all of American literature, has been a harder sell to prospective readers than Joel Barlow's Columbiad (1807). It has long been regarded warily or condescendingly as perhaps the baggiest of American literature's own great "baggy monsters"-those imperial long poems proliferated in the Revolution's wake among a small group of elite writers. Their ponderous and (paradoxically for aspiring epic poets) serially private laboring to represent the new republic as, fundamentally and fatally, the renovated telos of patriarchal western history would seem to have been driven by the felt absence of a living, vitalizing audience of new imperial citizens. Epic has a deep, core reflexivity regarding reception-the extending fellowship between its poet and readers that must ever proceed apace with the dread of mutual alienation, which grows with the imperial longing he expresses, bears, and bears through them. That reflexivity seems most conspicuous by its absence in these poems. Certainly such a longing dominates, if only negatively, the dream of achieving a traditional epic that lived for precisely one post-Revolutionary generation, from the static, infinitely horizontal typology of Timothy Dwight's The Conquest of Canaan (1784) to the allencompassing cartographies of the Columbiad, published just four years after the Louisiana Purchase. Epics endure for readers across centuries to the extent that their projections of their cultures' history without end do not simply override personal experience but are fraught with the depth, texture, and doubt of those lives undergoing such a grand paraphrase: the dialogisms of patria (Virgil), of a dying chivalry (Spenser), of a Protestant faith imperiled by the kingdom of this world (Milton) countered by a Catholic crusading for that kingdom's promise of a more incarnate eros of heroic surrender (Tasso), and of a democratic reconception of that surrender as expansive affirmation (Whitman), all drive these epic narratives beyond their derivations and specific historical moments because they issue from a central enduring concern-with all the hopes and fears that attend the remaking of language to realize a culture's aspiriations to transcendence. As, essentially, so many grand elaborations of the central ambivalence resounding most deeply from its foundational story of Aeneas and...