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Joel Barlow's The Hasty Pudding: A Study in American Neoclassicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2011
Extract
Although he was known by his contemporaries as a political figure and as the author of a long “philosophical” poem entitled The Vision of Columbus (1787), later retitled The Columbiad (1807), Joel Barlow's name and fame, such as they are today, have survived solely by his humorous poem The Hasty Pudding (1796). While it is not the purpose of this paper to provide a critical estimate of the poem, the judgment of posterity appears just; for The Hasty Pudding remains readable, whereas Columbus seems an interminable muddle. It is commonly remarked that the neoclassical literature of England particularly influenced that of eighteenth century America; but specific studies of this influence are not so common. To study selected elements demonstrating this influence in The Hasty Pudding is the aim of this paper. These elements are respectively form, poetic genres, borrowings, and tone.
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- Copyright © British Association for American Studies 1965
References
1.The difference between his contemporary and his modern reputation is well indicated by the biography of him in Public Characters of 1806. (London, 1806). This sketch devotes a good many pages to Barlow (pp. 152–80), as befitted his fame as a citizen of the world; Columbus is considered at length, but Hasty Pudding not at all.Google Scholar
2.Tyler, Moses Coit, Three Men of Letters (New York, 1895), p. 173; Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago, 1943), p. 294.Google Scholar
4.Gay's Rural Sports (1713) is also largely in this school, but is notable as well for some exceptionally fine passages of realistic description.Google Scholar
5.Samuel Johnson's contempt for the country is well known, and the poetry of Swift and Crabbe contains severe criticism of rural life.Google Scholar
6.The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality. Night the First, 1742, 1. 392.Google Scholar
7.Quoted from the corrected impression of 1655.Google Scholar
8.Compare “Spring”, II. 356–67, and The Hasty Pudding, III, 56–61, for Barlow's comic treatment of Thomson's sentimental effusion on the cow.Google Scholar
9.Compare the first twelve lines of The Traveller with The Hasty Pudding, I. 57–62, where again, as with the lines from Thomson, Barlow treats the same theme but with less sentimentality than does the eighteenth century prototype.Google Scholar
10.Compare especially The Deserted Village, II. 20–30, with The Hasty Pudding, III, 15–26.Google Scholar
11.Tyler, p. 97, observes of Greenfield Hill that “Even when the poem does not descend quite to the depth of parody, it does reproduce too closely, and too often, the very notes of Thomson, or Goldsmith, of Beattie, Edward Moore, or Gay.” Dwight's poem was entirely serious, but an element of parody in Barlow's poem only contributes to the deliberately humorous effect.Google Scholar
12.Oelsner, Konrad, Notice sur la vie et les écrits de M. Joël Barlow (Paris, 1813), p.9. The only other critic who has anything to say about Barlow's literary models is V---------------, the author of a “Sketch of the Life and Writings of Joel Barlow,” Analectic Magazine, IV (1814), 130–58, in an essay which appears to have escaped Barlow's bibliographers. V--------------- observes, p. 142, that “Barlow's versification is successfully modelled upon that of Goldsmith: he has interspersed his poem with several ludicrous parodies on the most popular passages of English poetry”; but he fails to specify any authors or lines parodied.Google Scholar