Carol A. Kyle

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

In American letters the impulse to write the great American novel
has been dwarfed only by the impulse to write the great American
epic: larger than both of these is the compulsion to create the great
American myth. The earliest attempt in American literature to do all
three at once occurs in Philip Freneau The Pictures of Columbus
( 1774 ).¹ This study suggests that The Pictures of Columbus is
neither neoclassical epic, nor folk legend, nor myth although it is cer-
tainly all these things. In fact, it is much more; Freneau's work is first
of all a poem and that poem reconstructs through a series of images a
myth that includes and supercedes even the Edenic myth in its exciting
legendary and epic possibilities: Christopher Columbus in the act of
discovering America. What has never been examined is the image of
this discovery theme as an act realized through a reenactment in the
form of poem. Freneau's creative translation of concept to act to
language to image appears most energetically in the poem's large
formal device announced in the title: the "Pictures" of Columbus con-
vey the thematic direction of the poem from imagined vision to actual-
ized reality through the imagistic reconstruction of the discovery of
America: Columbus finds his prepictured land to be in fact the new
world.²

Of the eighteen "pictures" or sections of the American colonial
epic, the first seven comprise a picture as an idea or as the conception of
a vision by the imagination, the image-making faculty of the mind;
the picture of the world that emerges is "unreal" but derives its sub-
stance from known facts about the "real" world. Columbus, quite
literally, in Picture I, "The Genoese," appears as a mapmaker. It
soon becomes clear that this Genoese is no copier of maps, but a maker
of maps just as a poet is a maker of words. The planning of the new
world occurs on several analogous levels: Columbus sees the then pres-
ent world as out of proportion; to effect a balance between art and
nature, he must artfully draw a land plan to fill the natural void in the
ocean and to balance the vast land mass of Asia in the East. So the

-62-