The Columbiad

[citation needed] The Columbiad had its origins in The Vision of Columbus, a philosophical poem begun in 1780 and continued through Barlow's service as a military chaplain in the American Revolutionary War.

[7][8] Over the next 20 years Barlow laboriously reworked The Vision, eventually expanding it from 4700 lines to 8350, building up a huge apparatus of prefaces and footnotes, and so altering the whole tenor of the work that it bore little resemblance to the original.

Others praised it to the skies, comparing it favourably with Homer, Virgil and Milton, but Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review found the plot incoherent and the style cumbrous and inflated.

[19] In France the revolutionary leader and former bishop Henri Grégoire published a vitriolic open letter taking grave exception to Barlow's secularist point of view, and this was extensively reprinted in the United States.

[20] Partly as a result of this controversy sales of The Columbiad continued healthy, but by the 1820s interest in the poem was waning, either because it was too concerned with the issues of its own day, because the evangelized American public at the time of the Second Great Awakening were not ready to take such a freethinking work to its heart, or because Barlow's Augustan conception of epic poetry seemed hopelessly old-fashioned in a Romantic age.

In 1917 the Cambridge History of American Literature conceded that "hidden away among these thousands of lines of laboured rhetoric, are passages really fine and free in both conception and execution";[30] the historian Vernon Louis Parrington wrote that while "it may not be good poetry...the sentiments are those of an enlightened and generous man";[31] and the academic Steven Blakemore, while acknowledging in a full-length study the many obstacles the poem presents to the modern reader, believes it to be "one of the most significant intertextual nineteenth-century poems in American literature".