Joel Barlow's "Canal" and Natural Religion

0 NE OF the most controversial books of the late eighteenth century was Constantin Volney's The Ruins or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires.' It was translated by Joel Barlow, the Jeffersonian republican and poet who is remembered today for the nostalgic but innocuous mock-epic poem entitled Hasty-Pudding. The Ruins came into Barlow's hands after Jefferson had decided it was too inflammatory, as stated by Barlow's biographer: knew Volney socially as a friend of Jefferson. . . . Jefferson had begun a translation of the book during the author's visit to the United States in 1797, but he never got beyond chapter twenty. After becoming President, Jefferson must have decided that he could not finish the work, or if he did he would be indiscreet to publish it. The Ruins was as radical a book as The Age of Reason and damned in the same breath by the clergy. Jefferson apparently suggested to Volney that Barlow might like to complete the task. 2 As the author of Advice to the Privileged Orders, a republican pamphlet almost as well known as Paine's radical work, Barlow was a likely choice to translate The Ruins. The volume is a tinderbox, setting off inflammatory religious controversy. It gives off a great amount of heat, most of which may now be dissipated by cool paraphrasing and analysis. As for the meaning of The Ruins in the eighteenth century, it represents a materialistic philosophy in which every religion is conceived as a development from organic nature, and it advocates the iconoclastic equality, liberty and fraternity of radical republicanism. Barlow's unpublished poem, the Canal, has its source in the natural religion of The Ruins, a condition which provides an insight

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Natural (archaeology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Philosophy

• "A Slave" Writes Thomas Jefferson

  Thomas N Baker, Thomas N Baker Thomas N Baker•The William and Mary Quarterly•2011

  Add to list