SOURCE: "Joel Barlow and the Rising Glory of America," in The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists,

"Poise with one hand your bowl": an illustration from Barlow's Hasty Pudding.

Lowance is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on early American literature. In the following excerpt, he discusses how Barlow adapted the traditional language of religious millenialism in writing the Columbiad, his epic about "America's technological and political future.'

The problem of language and its relation to genre or form was resolved in Puritan New England by writers and preachers whose rhetorical responses to political, social, and spiritual conditions were governed by biblical precedent. For example, just as the theocracy of early Massachusetts Bay Colony had been established following the model of the Old Testament theocracy and was originally...