Background.

American poets of the early republican era hoped to write a great American epic to consecrate their ancestors' accomplishments and give the nation a heroic past, just as Homer and Virgil had done for ancient Greece and Rome. Because the epic also represented the ultimate mark of cultural achievement, the writing of a successful American epic would conclusively put to rest doubts about the nation's cultural maturity and contribute to the future progress of the nation. Barlow's Epic. Joel Barlow made the most ambitious and sustained attempt to realize these aspirations in his epic poem The Columbiad (1807), a revised version of his earlier poem The Vision of Columbus (1787). Barlow intended The Vision of Columbus to be a "philosophic" poem about Columbus's discovery of America and its consequences. By giving a panoramic account of American history he sought to...