Joel Barlow

Biography

Joel Barlow was an American poet, diplomat and politician.In his own time, Barlow was well known for the epic Vision of Columbus. Modern readers may be more familiar with "The Hasty Pudding" (1793). He also partly drafted the Treaty of Tripoli, which includes the controversial and disputed phrase: "...the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...".

Biography

Barlow was born in Redding, Fairfield County, Connecticut. He briefly attended Dartmouth College before graduating from Yale University in 1778, where he was also a post-graduate student for two years. In 1778, he published an anti-slavery poem entitled "The Prospect of Peace." From September 1780 until the close of the revolutionary war was chaplain in a Massachusetts brigade. He then, in 1783, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, established there in July 1784 a weekly paper, the American Mercury, with which he was connected for a year, and in 1786 was admitted to the bar.

At Hartford he was a member of a group of young writers including Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, and John Trumbull, known in American literary history as the "Hartford Wits". He contributed to the Anarchiad, a series of satirico-political papers, and in 1787 published a long and ambitious poem, The Vision of Columbus, which gave him a considerable literary reputation and was once much read. Barlow died of pneumonia in the village of Zarnowiec, between Warsaw and Kraków, on December 24, 1812.

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