SOURCE: "Joel Barlow and The Anarchiad," Early American Literature, Vol. XXV, No. 1, 1990, pp. 18-33.

Dowling considers the "puzzle" of Barlow's role in the making of The Anarchiad, concluding that his participation must have been the result of "a certain limited and privileged moment in which men employing separate mental worlds could suppose themselves to be making identical sense out of issues identically urgent to them and their fellow citizens."

There are two puzzles associated with Joel Barlow's role in relation to The Anarchiad, the fragmentary mock-epic composed by a group of Hartford literati between October 1786 and September 1787 in hopes of influencing the momentous debate that would ultimately engender the United States Constitution. These may be called the compositional and the ideological, the first being simply the question of which numbers of The Anarchiad, or which parts of which numbers, were actually written by Barlow. It remains a puzzle...