The Hasty-Pudding is a mock-heroic poem by Joel Barlow. First published in 1796 in The New-York Magazine , it is now commonly anthologized.
Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities to such a point that they become absurd.
Joel Barlow was an American poet and diplomat, and French politician. In politics, he supported the French Revolution and was an ardent Jeffersonian republican.
The New-York Magazine; or, Literary Repository was a monthly literary magazine published in New York City from 1790 to 1797, and claimed as one of the four most important magazines of its time. One of the longest-running magazines of that era, it focused on theater and travel writing and also essays, poems, and short stories.
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The poem, on the literal level, celebrates the simple life exemplified in the new America by hasty pudding (or cornmeal mush). In three cantos (the principal division known from epic and heroic poetry) he celebrates the mythical origin of corn, its production, and its consumption within the homely setting of the American farmer. That there are different levels of reading the poem is made clear by its many allusions to contemporary political, philosophical, and religious writers, and by the position of the narrator. According to Leo Lemay, Barlow's poem "concerns literature, mythology, politics, and culture": [1]
Hasty pudding is a pudding or porridge of grains cooked in milk or water. In the United States, it often refers to a version made of ground corn. Hasty pudding is mentioned in a verse of the early American song "Yankee Doodle".
Mush is a type of cornmeal pudding which is usually boiled in water or milk. It is often allowed to set, or gel into a semisolid, then cut into flat squares or rectangles, and pan fried. Usage is especially common in the eastern and southeastern United States. It is customary in the midwestern United States to eat it with maple syrup or molasses. In Eastern Europe, milk is poured over the meal once served and cooled down, rather than being boiled in it. Cornmeal mush is often consumed in Latin America and Africa.
The canto is a principal form of division in medieval and modern long poetry. The word canto is derived from the Italian word for "song" or "singing", which comes from the Latin cantus, "song", from the infinitive verb canere, "to sing". The use of the canto was described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica as " a convenient division when poetry was more usually sung by the minstrel to his own accompaniment than read". There is no specific format, construction or style for a canto and it is not limited to any one type of poetry.
- Like Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism , Barlow argues that an Age of Poetry can be discerned in the "ancient traditions" of country folk, and the poem's language of taste (the taste and consumption of hasty pudding) reflects a critique of (artificial) eighteenth-century standards set by literary critics; [2]
- The speaker is a kind of Manco Cápac, a sun god of the Incas (and Lemay argues he is a Wandering Jew as well), and the poem throughout celebrates the growth and consumption of corn and mush as belonging to sacred ritual; [3]
- The praise of simple food is a critique of the life of civilized luxury belonging to an aristocracy which Barlow, a lifelong democrat and student of the French Revolution, abhorred, and is aimed squarely at such authors as Edmund Burke, to whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) Barlow wrote a two-part reply critical of Burke's denigrating comments toward the "swinish multitude". Barlow argues, in the first part of his Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792), that "the state is the responsible agent of all men rather than of the privileged class"; Burke's "swinish multitude" (i.e., the common man) is rephrased by Barlow (in satirical fashion) as "pampered pigs", a denigrating term used by "gaudy prigs" (ll. 113–14); [4]
- References to American culture are made throughout: the poem contains "an early, sustained use and praise of folklore and folk customs" [5] with context provided by, among others, the writings of "Homespun" (that is, Benjamin Franklin), popular songs such as "Yankee Doodle", the Ossian cycle, and William Collins's poems on popular superstition. [6]
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet. He is best known for his satirical verse, including Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, and for his translation of Homer. He is the second-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations after Shakespeare.
An Essay on Criticism is one of the first major poems written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744). It is the source of the famous quotations "To err is human, to forgive divine," "A little learning is a dang'rous thing", and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." It first appeared in 1711 after having been written in 1709, and it is clear from Pope's correspondence that many of the poem's ideas had existed in prose form since at least 1706. Composed in heroic couplets and written in the Horatian mode of satire, it is a verse essay primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope's contemporary age. The poem covers a range of good criticism and advice, and represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope's age.
Manco Cápac, also known as Manco Inca and Ayar Manco was, according to some historians, the first governor and founder of the Inca civilization in Cusco, possibly in the early 13th century. He is also a main figure of Inca mythology, being the protagonist of the two best known legends about the origin of the Inca, both of them connecting him to the foundation of Cusco. His main wife was Mama Uqllu, also mother of his son and successor Sinchi Ruq'a. Even though his figure is mentioned in several chronicles, his actual existence remains unclear.
