#THE RISING GLORY OF AMERICA FULL#

#THE RISING GLORY OF AMERICA FULL#

Nor do I intend to devote much space to a discussion ofД«arlowвЂ™s long poem, but duty dictates we start there, at full fathom five, because we shall in time end back at the buoy. The Columbiad is honored rather much in the manner of the Union ironclad lying deep in the treacherous waters off Cape Harteras, namely by exhibiting a few choice relics rescued from the wreck and for the rest, by pointing to a buoy marking where itВ sank. We are seldom moved by what we hear to open and actually read the book.

Most critics who admire BarlowвЂ™s big book tend to speak in gentle generalities and quote sparingly. Barlow has his admirers, but they are generally drawn to his personal qualities and his enlightened political views, and even Hyatt Waggoner, in praising the lightness of wit and flexibility of numbers in BarlowвЂ™s heroic verse somehow resembles Colonel Mulberry Sellers regaling himself with a banquet of raw turnips. Well, The Columbiad certainly presents, like the statues of sundry university founders and presidents, a handsome target of opportunity, nor has there been a successful attempt to rescue it from ridicule. вЂњFultonвЂ™s FollyвЂќ they called the boat before it began to move, and so it might have been also with BarlowвЂ™s book, вЂњFollyвЂќ being an architectural epithet connoting expenditure beyond worth, size beyond function, a ruinous exercise of misspent minor talent. This parting of the ways may be read as an allegory foretelling the fate of poetry in Republican America, a world which put its highest value on mechanisms motivated by caloric not the muse, but then too it must be said that as an epic The Columbiad seems to have had its fate sealed in its many faults, which are so numerous that the book has suffered less neglect than contumely. But with the success of the steamboat, the two men drifted apart, and the plan to collaborate on a long poem celebrating the triumphs of modern technology, вЂњThe Canal,вЂќ never got beyond a single canto written byВ Barlow. Both the book and the boat were signal expressions of the Enlightenment faith in universal progress, certified by BarlowвЂ™s having dedicated his epic to Fulton, who seemed the progressive spirit of the age personified. Though dissimilar in outcome, these two events had a certain interrelatedness: Barlow and Fulton were good friends, and where the poet had assisted the inventor in his first experiments with steam navigation when both men were residing in France, so Fulton had executed a portrait of Barlow to be used as the frontispiece for The Columbiad and had overseen the engraving of the illustrationsДЇor the book. Nothing similar followed upon the launching of The Columbiad, an ambitious work on which Barlow had labored for years only to watch it sink below the waters of public acknowledgement with barely a ripple.

With the launching of the Clermont, there began a transportation and technological revolution in America that within half a century had linked most major centers in the East and Midwest by rails, rivers, or canals, and was fast forming a connection with the Pacific Coast. In 1807, there were simultaneously launched in the United States Robert FultonвЂ™s first successful steamboat, the Clermont, and Joel BarlowвЂ™s last attempt at an epic, The Columbiad.

The rising glory of america