In preparing this work for publication it seems proper to offer some
observations explanatory of its design. The classical reader will perceive
the obstacles which necessarily presented themselves in reconciling the
nature of the subject with such a manner of treating it as should appear
the most poetical, and at the same time the most likely to arrive at that
degree of dignity and usefulness to which it ought to aspire.

The Columbiad is a patriotic poem; the subject is national and historical.
Thus far it must be interesting to my countrymen. But most of the events
were so recent, so important and so well known, as to render them
inflexible to the hand of fiction. The poem therefore could not with
propriety be modelled after that regular epic form which the more splendid
works of this kind have taken, and on which their success is supposed in a
great measure to depend. The attempt would have been highly injudicious;
it must have diminished and debased a series of actions which were really
great in themselves, and could not be disfigured without losing their
interest.

I shall enter into no discussion on the nature of the epopea, nor attempt
to prove by any latitude of reasoning that I have written an Epic Poem.
The subject indeed is vast; far superior to any one of those on which the
celebrated poems of this description have been constructed; and I have no
doubt but the form I have given to the work is the best that the subject
would admit. It may be added that in no poem are the unities of time, place
and action more rigidly observed: the action, in the technical sense of
the word, consisting only of what takes place between Columbus and Hesper;
which must be supposed to occupy but few hours, and is confined to the
prison and the mount of vision.