Joel Barlow

Joel Barlow (* March 24, 1754 in Redding, Connecticut, † October 22, 1812 in Żarnowiec in Krakow, Poland) was an American poet, statesman and political writer.

Life

Barlow studied law at Dartmouth College and later at Yale University, where he has already made ​​known by several poems. In the Revolutionary War he served, after six weeks of preparation, to 1783 as a military chaplain. Then he lived as a lawyer and editor of a newspaper in Hartford, where he soon was one of the Hartford Wits. He worked on the translation of the Psalms of Isaac Watts for church use and debuted in 1787 with the poem The Vision of Columbus, which, filled with ardent patriotism, enthusiastic reception took place.

As an agent of the Scioto Land Company in 1788, he went to Europe to offer lands, a company that did not contribute little to the rapid establishment of the State of Ohio. During his stay in London he gave 1791 Advice to the Privileged Orders (Vol. 1) and the next year the poem Conspiracy of Kings, a Poem Addressed to the Inhabitants of Europe from another Quarter of the Globe out, to which he by the Federation of continental powers against France was initiated.

At the same time he sent a letter to the National Convention in Paris, wherein he called them, to abolish the monarchy. Sent in the autumn of 1792, the club constitution (London Society for Constitutional Information ) in London to Paris, he found here a brilliant reception and in 1793 French honorary citizen as well as Commissioner for the newly acquired Savoy.

There he wrote the popular comic epic Hasty Pudding. In 1795 he was appointed to the American Commissioners for Algiers, where he effected treaties with the Barbary States Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli joined and the release of the Americans trapped there by order of George Washington. In 1797 he was back in Paris.

Become rich through business speculation, he went back to America in 1805 and settled in Washington to dedicate in a rural seclusion from now on all the sciences. 1811 President James Madison appointed him Minister to Paris; as such he died, appointed by Napoleon Bonaparte to a conference in Vilnius, on 22 October 1812 in Żarnowiec in Krakow.

Works (selection)

• Letters to the Citizens of the United States of America on the system of Policy (1800)
• The Columbiad (Philadelphia 1808 an extension of the vision of Columbus )