Hartford Wits Critical Essay | Gregg Camfield

Gregg Camfield

SOURCE: "Joel Barlow's Dialectic of Progress," in Early American Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 2, Fall, 1986, pp. 131-43.

Here, Camfield explores Barlow's understanding of Enlightenment and humanistic concepts as mirrored in several of his works.

If, as Emory Elliott suggests [in Revolutionary Writers, 1982], contradictions and inconsistencies make Joel Barlow's The Vision of Columbus interesting in spite of itself, then by the same standards Barlow's political pamphlets of the early 1790s are doubly interesting: while vibrant and powerful in their own right, they are also "full of contradictions." The contradictions in these prose works are not symptoms of his conversions or signs of his "desperate effort to make sense of his evolving world view" (Elliott) because, by 1790, Barlow had passed through the intellectual upheaval that had converted him from Calvinism to Deism and from Federalist conservatism to Jeffersonian progressivism. With the courage of his new convictions, Barlow seemed aggressively...
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