“Fulton’s Folly” they called the boat before it began to move, and so it might have been also with Barlow’s book, “Folly” being an architectural epithet connoting expenditure beyond worth, size beyond function, a ruinous exercise of misspent minor talent. This parting of the ways may be read as an allegory foretelling the fate of poetry in Republican America, a world which put its highest value on mechanisms motivated by caloric not the muse, but then too it must be said that as an epic The Columbiad seems to have had its fate sealed in its many faults, which are so numerous that the book has suffered less neglect than contumely. But with the success of the steamboat, the two men drifted apart, and the plan to collaborate on a long poem celebrating the triumphs of modern technology, “The Canal,” never got beyond a single canto written by Barlow.

Both the book and the boat were signal expressions of the Enlightenment faith in universal progress, certified by Barlow’s having dedicated his epic to Fulton, who seemed the progressive spirit of the age personified.

Though dissimilar in outcome, these two events had a certain interrelatedness: Barlow and Fulton were good friends, and where the poet had assisted the inventor in his first experiments with steam navigation when both men were residing in France, so Fulton had executed a portrait of Barlow to be used as the frontispiece for The Columbiad and had overseen the engraving of the illustrationsįor the book. Nothing similar followed upon the launching of The Columbiad, an ambitious work on which Barlow had labored for years only to watch it sink below the waters of public acknowledgement with barely a ripple.

With the launching of the Clermont, there began a transportation and technological revolution in America that within half a century had linked most major centers in the East and Midwest by rails, rivers, or canals, and was fast forming a connection with the Pacific Coast. In 1807, there were simultaneously launched in the United States Robert Fulton’s first successful steamboat, the Clermont, and Joel Barlow’s last attempt at an epic, The Columbiad.

The rising glory of america