SOURCE: Kyle, Carol A. “That Poet Freneau: A Study of the Imagistic Success of The Pictures of Columbus.” Early American Literature 9, no. 1 (spring 1974): 62-70.

In the following essay, Kyle discusses Freneau's attempt to create an American myth in the form of an epic poem about Christopher Columbus.

In American letters the impulse to write the great American novel has been dwarfed only by the impulse to write the great American epic: larger than both of these is the compulsion to create the great American myth. The earliest attempt in American literature to do all three at once occurs in Philip Freneau's “The Pictures of Columbus” (1774).¹ This study suggests that “The Pictures of Columbus” is neither neoclassical epic, nor folk legend, nor myth although it is certainly all these things. In fact, it is much more; Freneau's work is first of all a poem and that poem reconstructs through...