Chapter 9 “To gird this watery globe” Freneau, Barlow, and American neoclassical poetry

Paul Giles

The idea of transatlantic exchange informing English poetry of the early modern period is an old conception, one that can be traced back as far as Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue Between Old England and New” (1630), which plays out through the form of a poetic dialogue those frictions between Anglican Establishment and Puritan dissent that permeated the English-speaking world at this time. Bradstreet wrote this work in the same year as she migrated with her husband and parents – her father, Thomas Dudley, was a steward in the Earl of Lincoln’s household – to Massachusetts Bay, and her poetry in general mediates stylistically the relative values of courtly Renaissance decorum and individualistic self-scrutiny. In the second half of the twentieth century, Bradstreet was characteristically appropriated as the harbinger of an authentic American idiom by the likes of John Berryman, whose epic “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1956) celebrates her as the first of the confessional poets, and by Adrienne Rich, whose 1966 essay “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet” installs Bradstreet as the inaugurator of an American feminist tradition in the way she shows “the limitations of a point of view which took masculine history and literature as its center.” In a clear corollary to her own flight in the 1950s and 1960s from poetic formalism into a looser experiential mode, Rich went on in this critical essay to praise Bradstreet for her escape from the generic conventions that had circumscribed her earlier writings: “No more Ages of Man, no more Assyrian monarchs; but poems in response to the simple events in a woman’s life.”¹ But what such emancipationist rhetoric ignores are the manifold ways in which Bradstreet creatively reoriented the ritualistic works of Philip Sidney and Guillaume du Bartas in order to exemplify, by dialogic contrast, the ways in which a nonconformist spirit might be able to seek space for itself behind the elaborate monuments of European courtly traditions. Bradstreet’s poetry always needs the models of Sidney and Bartas to play itself off against; her work is not sequentially English and then American, but transatlantic from first to last.

Although of course acts of creative appropriation by writers such as Berryman and Rich are intellectually interesting in their own right, they also involve forms of radical dehistoricization that effectively flatten out cultural cross-currents in the interests of bringing particular texts into conformity with some kind of nationalist or other teleology imposed retrospectively upon them. Michael Wigglesworth’s poem The Day of Doom (1662), for example, is a jeremiad written in New England that would not have taken the apocalyptic shape it did without the threat of Restoration England looming large across the Atlantic. Wigglesworth himself had been born in Yorkshire, back in Old England, and the desire on the part of New England poets to protect their regenerated state against the discomfiting aspects of modernity then emerging in Europe was one of the impulses behind successive waves of religious revivalism in these American colonies through (and beyond) the time of the Revolution.² Conversely, Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, written in England between 1663 and 1678, takes a scabrous delight in satirizing Puritan “Saints” and impugning what the skeptical Butler takes to be their conceited, self-proclaimed conception of “inward light.”³ The point to emphasize here, quite simply, is that both English and American poetry of the seventeenth century need to be read and understood on a transatlantic axis in order properly to trace their intellectual genealogy and dynamics. Just as modern American literary criticism has tended to be unduly nationalistic in its preoccupations, so the kind of traditional triumphalism often associated with English styles of critical historiography has tended to champion, implicitly or explicitly, the Royalist Restoration of 1660 as the return of solid British common sense, when good citizens could once again enjoy Christmas festivities and go to the theatre. This has meant, as David Norbrook has observed, that the Protectorate interregnum has been more or less written out of English literary and cultural history.⁴ For example, the transatlantic dimensions to the English Civil War of the 1640s, in which two of the sons of John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts, fought on behalf of Cromwell’s New Model Army, along with ways in which Winthrop’s vision of America as a “city upon a hill” helped to shape debates in the 1650s about the status of the English Parliament, remain still relatively underexplored topics.⁵ Yet, a sense of colonization and geographic displacement operating at this time as a literal or metaphorical corollary to disputes in philosophy and theology is something that permeates all canonical English poetry of the seventeenth century – the famous works of Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton – just as the spectre of what Bradstreet called “Old England” was a constant concern for those located physically on the other side of the Atlantic.⁶

In the eighteenth century, the transatlantic focus gradually shifted from issues of religious freedom to the more secular questions of empire and commerce that typically concerned Enlightenment liberals. It is now rather odd to think of how a wide range of eighteenth-century American poetry was neglected for so long, in large part simply because its more worldly aesthetics could not readily be brought into alignment with the ideological impulse that, for American critics in the years after World War II, assumed the self-authenticating strain of transcendentalism to be both symptomatic and synecdochic of American literary identity. While the hermeneutics of seventeenth-century Puritan poetry could plausibly be cast as a “precursor” to Emersonian self-reliance, with the common thread being a desire to read nature allegorically or typologically, the neoclassical idiom favored by many eighteenth-century American writers, from Ebenezer Cook to Phillis Wheatley, was by contrast largely passed over as exemplifying what critics “in the American grain” took to be merely a debasing materialism or demeaning conformity to Old World traditions.⁷ Yet the widespread popularity of Alexander Pope in eighteenth-century America involved not simply a reproduction of rigid Augustan order but rather an imitation of Pope’s aesthetic relish for bringing high and low, the conservative and the carnivalesque, into paradoxical juxtaposition. In the manner of William Hogarth, whose art works were also very popular in eighteenth-century America, Pope’s transatlantic followers – Mather Byles, Jonathan Odell, and others – drew frequently upon tropes of caricature, reflection, and mirroring across oceanic distance to refashion the Twickenham master’s Aristotelian dialectic of essence and accident within a more self-consciously colonial framework, where the dialogue between London and Boston, imperial center and provincial margin, might take on a quizzical, interrogative cast.⁸ What Pope described in Peri Bathous as a taste for the “art of sinking in poetry,” a faculty he ridiculed as characteristic of inferior verse while also declaring it provocatively to be “implanted by Nature itself in the soul of man,” is thus creatively remodeled by Byles and Odell into an art of desublimation, whereby the magnification and diminution of rhetorical figures across space and time takes on deliberately comic forms.⁹

The intertextual dialogue with Pope in the work of American neoclassical poets thus introduces a self-consciously double-edged strain, where ideas of order are simultaneously projected and disavowed. Phillis Wheatley is another American follower of Pope whose dexterous verbal play silently subverts assumptions of established order by illuminating, in her case, how the economics of slavery operate: “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refined, and join the angelic train.”¹⁰ The series of strategic puns here – Cain/sugar cane, spiritual refinement/refinement (distillation) of rum – suggests how this African-American woman did not conceive of neoclassicism merely as a highly specialized or elitist form, but as a ludic space within which different discursive possibilities could be brought playfully into juxtaposition. But all this is, of course, very different in kind from the idealization of regional or national landscapes as a source of immanent value, such as we see in the later Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth or Walt Whitman. Just as the cosmopolitan proclivities of Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Voltaire positioned themselves in direct opposition to local pieties, so the neoclassical idiom of eighteenth-century poetics created space for a shuttling of alternate perspectives across different geographic and conceptual zones. Rather than sentimentally conceiving of eighteenth-century American poetry as representing in embryonic form the “democratic personality” that constitutes “the essence of genuine American character,” it would be more productive to consider how poets of this time manipulated the principles of aesthetic exchange deliberately to position their work in relation to a wider world.¹¹

In this sense, the thesis of Charles W. J. Withers that “[g]eographical knowledge was central to how the world came to understand itself in the Enlightenment” has important implications not only for American poetry during the colonial period but also for the position of US literature and culture more generally at the end of the eighteenth century. Withers’s assertion that the reordering of geographical space in the second half of the eighteenth century was “how the earth came to be known as a world” has sat uneasily with the familiar assumptions of American exceptionalism, whereby it was seen as the specific task of the fledgling United States to epitomize a new world order.¹² In 1772, Philip Freneau published in conjunction with his Princeton classmate, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, an epic poem “The Rising Glory of America,” and it was this image of inevitable expansion that was to become inextricably intertwined with the US image of itself in the wake of its successful revolution. It was this model of America’s “rising glory,” with its literature appearing like a new-born organism emerging naturally into the light, which served subsequently as a basis for the national narratives that dominated the academic field of “American literature” all through the twentieth century. It is important to recognize, however, that Freneau, like other American writers of this time, was working in a complicated historical situation where the prospects for national advancement were balanced against a larger trajectory of global discovery, with his poems reflecting a sense of this complexity. Thus, to see Freneau as what Hyatt Howe Waggoner called a “transitional” poet – “Freneau had the misfortune to be a ‘transitional’ poet, imitative in the old mode, not yet fully aware of, or able to create, the new romantic mode” – or to regard him, like Annette Kolodny, as a kind of national poet manqué – “To the last, Freneau struggled to proclaim the pastoral possibility of America” – involves a serious underestimation of ways in which the poet attempted intellectually to reconcile his pride in US political independence with an equally compelling vision of the nation’s geographical interdependence.¹³

Freneau’s proper subject was in fact not so much US national destiny per se but, rather, a rebalancing of the world to accommodate American interests. His 1782 poem “The Political Balance,” subtitled “The Fates of Britain and America Compared,” is itself formally balanced, in that the poem is composed in rhyming alexandrines that pair up with each other, and this process of balancing equal and opposite forces fits with the poem’s emphasis on complementary oceans (the Pacific as well as the Atlantic) and on symmetrical lines of geographical demarcation. Freneau comically depicts “Old Vulcan” remodeling the globe in accordance with the new political realities of the late eighteenth century:

An axis he hammered, whose ends were the poles,

(On which the whole body perpetually rolls)

A brazen meridian he added to these,

Where four times repeated were ninety degrees.

I am sure you had laughed to see his droll attitude,

When he bent round the surface the circles of latitude,

The zones, and the tropics, meridians, equator,

And other fine things that are drawn on salt water.

Away to the southward (instructed by Pallas)

He placed in the ocean the Terra Australis,

New Holland, New Guinea, and so of the rest –

AMERICA lay by herself in the west.¹⁴

The bathetic anthropomorphism evoked here in Freneau’s caricature of the pagan gods serves effectively to undermine the puffed-up spirit of American exceptionalism by playing off the country’s sense of its own splendid isolation against a wider recognition of how, as different empires rise and fall, the shape of the globe necessarily changes over time.

The comic impulse of Freneau’s poem thus carries a universalist design, exemplifying the remark Freneau made in 1782 about how “[d]iscord and disorder are interwoven with the nature and constitution of the human race.”¹⁵ There is no doubt about Freneau’s personal animosity towards Britain: his spirited Anglophobia derived in part from his own capture and detention for six weeks in 1780 on board a British prison ship, while his 1778 poem “America Independent; and Her Everlasting Deliverance from British Tyranny and Oppression” vituperatively describes King George III as “the Nero of our times.”¹⁶ In aesthetic terms, however, Freneau’s more measured contribution to American revolutionary poetics was to ask the key question, as David S. Shields put it: “what are the imperial legacies in the self-understanding of the United States?”¹⁷ Many of Freneau’s later poems feature imagery of global exploration: the “blazing Comet” that “Far southward travels day and night” in “Stanzas on the Great Comet”; the sailors who “First put a girdle round the Globe” in “Circumnavigation”; the legend of Captain Cook in “Stanzas Made at the Interment of a Sailor.”¹⁸ All of these geographic allusions serve implicitly to endorse the words of Jove in “The Political Balance,” when he says: “To rebel is the sin, to revolt is no crime.”¹⁹ That is to say, the idea of revolution as a natural principle – the turning of the seasons, and the turning of the earth – works to validate objectively the realignment of political power that Freneau seeks here. In this sense, the global domain is not a distraction from Freneau’s focus upon the rising glory of America, but integral to it: it is precisely a recalibration of the political balance that allows the United States to rise in the scales, and this is why neoclassical symmetries and poetic order operate as a crucial conceptual framework for Freneau’s poetry. He was not, as Kolodny and others have imagined, merely a frustrated Romantic, but a writer concerned to modulate the burgeoning subjective spirit of his new nation through systematic dialogues with both classical mythology and an Enlightenment scientific compass.

Astronomy was also extolled as a basis for scientific knowledge in the work of Freneau’s political ally Thomas Paine, to whose work The Rights of Man Freneau dedicated a poem in 1792. In The Age of Reason (1794), Paine deliberately maps out “the system of worlds to which our earth belongs,” the “solar system” encompassing planets and moons, as a means acerbically to demystify the “despotic ignorance” that he associated with established religions.²⁰ Dating his own intellectual enlightenment from the time in his youth when he “purchased a pair of globes” and became acquainted with the “excellent astronomer” John Bevis, who made important celestial observations and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765, Paine uses The Age of Reason to emphasize his conception of the universe as a series of spherical motions – “the revolution of the earth round itself, and round the sun, the revolution of the moon round the earth, the revolution of the planets round the sun” – all of which serves to deconstruct the fanciful religious mythologies handed down by church lore. Although in The Age of Reason Paine professed a Deist belief in “one God, and no more,” finding the overall architecture of the universe to be charged with a divine providence, he also refurbished the discourse of astronomy, like Freneau, for radical purposes, in order to set the New World spinning in an opposite direction.²¹ J. R. Pole has noted how it became “commonplace” in the late eighteenth century to compare the system of the American Constitution to a model of “Newtonian cosmic order,” and the American neoclassical poets of this time were advocating something similar in aesthetic terms, except that they were proposing a classical framework rather than Enlightenment science as the architectonic structure against which narratives of the new Republic might seek to measure and naturalize themselves.²²

One reason, then, for the grotesque neglect of the Connecticut Wits – Timothy Dwight, Richard Alsop, Joel Barlow, and others – on the part of modern American literary critics is that these poets, like Freneau, tended to conceive of the culture of the new United States in global rather than narrowly nationalistic terms.²³ Barlow’s The Columbiad, heralded by Charles Brockden Brown on the poem’s publication in 1807 as “a work of the highest interest in a literary view that the present age has produced,” has now accumulated a popular reputation for being unreadable, and it has become largely invisible within the American literary canon.²⁴ There are various other historical reasons for this, including the intellectual incapacity of influential New Critics after World War II to appreciate long poems of any kind, together with their tendency to over-value Barlow’s much shorter poem, The Hasty Pudding, because of its folk themes and greater accessibility to a domestic audience. An egregious but not untypical example of the 1950s approach to Barlow can be found in James Woodress’s critical biography of the poet: “He placed inflated value on his Columbiad, lavished great energy on it, and failed completely to realize that his humorous Hasty Pudding alone gave him a chance to be remembered as a poet.”²⁵ Yet the ten books of The Columbiad actually comprise an extraordinarily ambitious and complex work, a poem that seeks to map out not only a new model of nationhood but also a new kind of art, one whose organization around a series of structural paradoxes reflects a geographical world suspended between two magnetic poles. The Columbiad is, above all, a water-based poem: though the author declares explicitly in his preface that “The Columbiad is a patriotic poem,” its central focus is not on the independent American nation as such, but on navigators from Columbus through to Cook and Magellan who redefined the shape of the earth through their voyages of discovery.²⁶ The genius of Columbus is to bring different geographic zones into a pattern of convergence – “Join distant lands, and neighboring seas divide” (p. 11) – and this is consistent with Barlow’s imagery of a concave, curving planet, a “kindred orb” (p. 15) with “rich rounds of sea-encircled earth” (p. 22): Magellan, for example, is celebrated for his attempt “To gird this watery globe” (p. 21). The emphasis in the poem’s first book is thus on “commingling” (p. 24), on bringing together local and global: “Thy stream, my Hartford, thro its misty robe, / Play’d in the sunbeams, belting far the globe” (p. 25). Such a link between Hartford, Connecticut, and the wider world also leads to a paradoxical continuum, where interior landscapes are defined in terms of their external correlatives, so that, for example, Ontario and other inland lakes of America are redescribed as “midland oceans” (p. 28). Within this realm of reversal, it is not oceans that sunder, but land itself that interrupts the circulation of the global waters.

This could hardly be more different from the authentication of immanent local value in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, published just two years before The Columbiad, but it does allow Barlow to adumbrate a radically new scheme of the cosmos, whereby a geophysical circumference organized around the magnetic poles supplants the old feudal system of social hierarchy. Barlow revises Pope and Wordsworth so that, instead of great chains of aristocratic being or empires built through subjugation, the world turns upon a free process of commerce and exchange. In this way, Barlow reworks the categorical distinctions of Pope’s Essay on Man according to a new logic of reciprocity, where “tyrant” and “slave” come to define each other:

Master and man the same vile spirit gains,

Rome chains the world, and wears herself the chains.

(p. 265)

Rather than upholding local establishments in the Wordsworthian manner, The Columbiad prides itself on its global mobility: “Now drains the southern, now the northern skies, / Searches and sunders far the globe’s vast frame” (p. 32). It couches this perpetual motion within an oxymoronic structure, where an unending dialogue between universal and transitory – “To the bright orb that gives the changing day” (p. 56) – becomes an external correlative to what Barlow describes as “Freedom’s first empire” (p. 22). This process of global circulation, in other words, is represented inherently as a philosophical constant, and this allows the epic poet to project the liberal design as its own form of universal order, as perennial as the diurnal cycle: “Mild as his morning stars and liberal as the day” (p. 83). In the preliminary “Argument” to Book IV, Barlow conflates social and economic interests by describing “Liberty” as “the necessary foundation of morals” (p. 108). Later in this section, he contrasts the hostility towards commerce in Europe – locked into its “slavish bands of monkish lore” (p. 111) – with the ideas of more enlightened countries that are linked by economic trading interests: “United nations there commence their sway.”

Although such liberal universalism might seem uncomfortably prescient of much more recent American invocations of a “new world order,” Barlow at the turn of the nineteenth century presents this shift from feudalism to commerce as an art of radical transposition, a “strange inversion” (p. 255) that envisages “New codes of empire to reform the old” (p. 123). Indeed, the entire structure of Barlow’s epic poem is impelled by a desire to turn the established world upside down. This manifests itself at the level of local imagery – as for example in Book III, where “Vast Amazonia, starr’d with twinkling streams / In azure drest, a heaven inverted seems” (p. 82) – and in Book IX’s celebration of scientific heroes such as Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus, who typically disrupt fixed patterns of social stability through their scientific iconoclasm. In his political essay Advice to the Privileged Orders (1791), Barlow had aligned advances in astronomy with progressive political causes, arguing that Ptolemy’s assumption of earth being at the center of the universe, now known not to be true, could be seen to have bolstered the entrenched hierarchies of the feudal order. Conversely, so Barlow argued in Advice, the more dispersed “Copernican system” of planets rotating around a distant sun, notoriously considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be a formula of atheism, might be seen to foreshadow the more democratic “rights of man” in the way it deliberately decentered fixed stars.²⁷ In The Columbiad, Descartes is similarly hailed as someone who turns conservative principles on their head:

Descartes with force gigantic toils alone,

Unshrines old errors and propounds his own;

Like a blind Samson, gropes their strong abodes,

Whelms deep in dust their temples and their gods.

(pp. 306–7)

In place of the Holy Trinity of Christian mythology, Barlow seeks here to install a new “glorious triad” (p. 308) consisting of “The Press, the Magnet, faithful to its pole / And earth’s own Movement round her steadfast goal” (p. 309). This suggests another reason for Barlow’s subsequent marginalization within the American literary canon: his aggressive atheism. Writing about “ideas of God and religion” in his notebooks of 1796–97, Barlow asked himself whether it might not be “possible wholly to destroy their influence and reduce them to the rank of other fables to be found only in the history of human errors?”²⁸ Influenced as it was by his experiences in post-Revolutionary France during the 1790s, Barlow’s atheism was not especially unusual among progressive intellectuals of his own day, but it made him appear increasingly anomalous within the more evangelical, sentimental temper of US culture in the nineteenth century, as well as among the more reactionary Christian Agrarians who dominated New Criticism in the twentieth.

Barlow acknowledges in the introduction to this poem how Columbus in his youth “had made great proficiency in geography, astronomy and drawing, as they were necessary to his favourite pursuit of navigation” (p. xvii), but The Columbiad reorganizes the assumptions of conventional science through its focus on “the spherical figure of the earth” (p. xvii), epitomized by the way the epic hero plans to sail to India by taking a westerly rather than easterly direction. The Columbiad’s own displacement of nouns into verbs, and vice versa – as in to “curve the rounds of time” (p. 283) – reflects this multi-directional pattern, with Barlow’s poetic language, like his larger themes, operating according to systems of mutual reciprocity, where opposites coalesce. Part of this double movement involves internal dialectics between different potentialities: Columbus, for example, becomes the spokesman for a cyclical theory of history, while Hesper responds by advocating a more linear teleology through which, as the author himself puts it in the notes to the poem, “future progress will probably be more rapid than the past” (p. 405). Yet the complex reversals and transpositions in The Columbiad leave the poem open to a multiplicity of positions in a way that Barlow’s flatter, more didactic political essays of the 1790s never fully achieve. Consequently, Barlow’s poetic manner of, in Steven Blakemore’s words, “turning British signifiers upside down so that the new American world could be presented right way up,” effectively projects a world that is always on the verge of being inverted.²⁹ The neoclassical shift from epic to mock-epic becomes analogous to a geographical spiral of displacement, whereby Columbus’s cartographic decentering of Europe becomes the harbinger of subsequent decenterings and rotations of the globe. America is thus presented not so much as the center of the world but as its focal point, the zone through which other narratives find themselves refracted, and Barlow’s strong emphasis in The Columbiad on the native cultures of South America – he depicts Mexico as “America’s Egypt,” in Ralph Bauer’s phrase, and presents the Inca past as America’s version of classical antiquity – emphasizes again his concern to reposition the United States within a larger global system.³⁰ Eric Wertheimer has also written of the “Pan-American” frame of The Columbiad, through which the United States is deliberately juxtaposed with cultures from its neighboring southern hemisphere, and Barlow specifically declined to omit this material on South America, despite being urged to do so by his cost-conscious London publishers.³¹ It is clear, then, that the whole momentum of The Columbiad involves an attempt to reconceptualize the significance of the new American Republic in relation to wider spherical gyrations.

William C. Dowling, in a perceptive critical discussion of The Columbiad, sees the poem as turning upon a process of “unmasking,” with Barlow applying a “logic of demystification” as he seeks to expose Christianity and other forms of mythology as sources of oppression.³² But though Dowling is right to stress the materialist emphasis in The Columbiad, his rationalization of Barlow does not seem quite to do justice to the oddball nature of the poem, its provocative tendency – rather like John Adams’s 1987 opera Nixon in China – to yoke contemporary politics to epic mythology within a burlesque framework where opposites paradoxically collide. In his Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809, Barlow described the United States as a “gigantic infant of a nation,” and something of this same oxymoronic quality permeates The Columbiad.³³ In this Oration, Barlow also envisaged America within what one might call a time-lapse mode, looking forward to the era when the ties of the nation would “continue to hold them together as one people when their number shall rise to hundreds of millions of freemen,” thereby suggesting the kind of synthetic compression of time and space that also characterizes The Columbiad. While there is no doubt about Barlow’s positive engagement with US culture and politics in the Jefferson era – he attended an official dinner in Washington in 1807 for Meriwether Lewis, who had recently returned from his expedition to the Pacific Ocean – there is also implicit throughout Barlow’s work a curious sense of estrangement or detachment, as if he were aware of living in a discursive space not entirely his own. “We are like a person conversing in a foreign language,” he wrote of American nationhood in his 1809 Oration, “whose idiom is not yet familiar to him.”³⁴

Eric Foner notes that Paine, Franklin, and other figures of this time “used the word ‘empire’ in its eighteenth-century sense of expanding territorial and commercial sovereignty, with none of the negative emotive implications of more modern usage,” and Barlow’s writing would clearly fit into this category as well.³⁵ Like Paine, Barlow deplored the oppressive British imperial administration in India, while welcoming the extension of the American empire as a global force for good. Indeed, in the final book of The Columbiad the entire world is envisaged in terms of a “federal union” (p. 319), as if the American model of polity were extended over the entire world:

Till one confederate, condependent sway

Spread with the sun and bound the walks of day,

One centred system, one all-ruling soul

Live thro the parts and regulate the whole.

(p. 341)

From our perspective, it is not difficult to infer the hegemonic designs implicit in Barlow’s vision of “a general Congress from all nations” (p. 314), where the word “Congress” expands punningly from its specific reference to the US system of government to embrace “the political harmony of mankind” (p. 314). Yet there is also an interesting sense in which The Columbiad anticipates what Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have described as the “new Thassalogy,” whereby the concept of an autonomous nation is supplanted by an emphasis on the porous, permeable nature of seas and oceans that connect land masses to each other.³⁶ Ian Baucom has similarly written of “hydrographies” as involving an “infinite intersection of cultures, commodities, narratives, and histories that constitute the shifting surfaces of the cross-Atlantic, the cross-Mediterranean, and the cross-Pacific,” a momentum of traversal that promotes “an enrichment of the actual by an ever greater manifestation of the virtual and an enlargement of the virtual by the renovation of the actual”; and this is precisely what we find in The Columbiad, where the circulation of global waters, along with the transposition of internal to external and vice versa, has the effect of loosening the boundaries between the historical and the hypothetical.³⁷ In this sense, the genius of Barlow’s poem is to use its reconfigured version of geography to map out an alternative version of history, one that foregrounds America’s relation to processes of exchange and globalization rather than simply extolling a more conventional form of national identity.

One of the most useful contributions of transatlantic studies in general involves its capacity to offer revisionist accounts of cultural history by reclaiming important literary works that have, for one kind of ideological reason or another, been unduly neglected. The Columbiad is a prime example of a long poem considered very important in its own day that a transnational critical perspective can help to bring back into proper focus. What The Columbiad calls “the watery world” (p. 232) epitomizes the kind of transoceanic dimension that eludes nationalist frameworks in the way it represents Barlow’s native country in terms of a continuous spiral of geographical displacement:

Whirls forth her globes in cosmogyral course,

By myriad and by millions, scaled sublime,

To scoop their skies, and curve the rounds of time.

(p. 283)

That phrase “scaled sublime” is another of Barlow’s oxymorons, of course, paradoxically reconstituting the idea of infinity within a measured, mathematical scale. Developing out of its primary focus on intercontinental exploration, The Columbiad thus projects a systematic style of bouleversement that sheds new light recursively upon both past and future, while simultaneously encompassing America within both Atlantic and Pacific oceans in order to, as Barlow’s poem puts it, let “the new world illuminate the old” (p. 213).

NOTES

1 Adrienne Rich, “The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (1979; rpt. London: Virago, 1980), pp. 21, 29.

2 Michael Wigglesworth, The Day of Doom; or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement (Cambridge, MA, 1662).

3 Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 23, 93.

4 On the “strongly monarchist bias” of English literary historians in the twentieth century, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 7.

5 See Carla Gardina Pesta, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and the fine dissertation by John Donoghue, “Radical Republicanism in England, America, and the Imperial Atlantic, 1624–1661,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2006.

6 Among works in this emerging area, see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from “Utopia” to “The Tempest” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and William M. Hamlin, The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare: Renaissance Ethnography and Literary Reflection (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).

7 William Carlos Williams’s In The American Grain (1925) belligerently and influentially argued the case for a nativist poetics. See Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 83–85.

8 On the popularity of Hogarth in eighteenth-century America, see Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), p. 12. On Pope and Byles, see Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 17–39.

9 Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727), in Prose and Poetry of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 391.

10 Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), p. 18.

11 Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 291.

12 Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 111.

13 Hyatt Howe Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Dell-Delta, 1968), p. 30; Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 50.

14 Philip Freneau, Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Hafner, 1960), pp. 72–73.

15 Silverman, A Cultural History, p. 422.

16 Freneau, Poems, p. 26.

17 David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 228.

18 Philip Freneau, The Last Poems of Philip Freneau, ed. Lewis Leary (1945; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 3, 96, 121.

19 Freneau, Poems, p. 74.

20 Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 438, 433.

21 Ibid., pp. 434, 436, 400.

22 J. R. Pole, “Enlightenment and the Politics of American Nature,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 195.

23 For a discussion of Dwight and Alsop as global poets, see Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 59–69.

24 Charles Brockden Brown, “The Columbiad,” American Register 1 (Feb. 1807), 217.

25 James Woodress, A Yankee’s Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1958), p. 24.

26 Joel Barlow, The Columbiad: A Poem (1807; rpt. London, 1809), p. iii. Subsequent page references to this edition are cited in the text.

27 Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders (1791), in The Political Writings of Joel Barlow (New York, 1796), p. 28.

28 Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 242.

29 Steven Blakemore, Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad”: A Bicentennial Reading (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), p. 328.

30 Ralph Bauer, “Colonial Discourse and Early American Literary History: Ercilla, the Inca Garcilaso, and Joel Barlow’s Conception of a New World Epic,” Early American Literature 30:3 (1995), 218.

31 Eric Wertheimer, Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 75.

32 William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 5, 113.

33 Joel Barlow, Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809; at the Request of the Democratic Citizens of the District of Columbia (Washington, DC, 1809), p. 3.

34 Ibid., pp. 7, 10.

35 Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 80.

36 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thassalogy,’” American Historical Review 111:3 (2006), 722–40.

37 Ian Baucom, “Hydrographies,” Geographical Review 89:1 (1999), 308, 306.