The Hasty-Pudding

• 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 reflects a critique of eighteenth-century standards set by literary critics;
• The speaker is a kind of Manco Cápac, a sun god of the Incas, and the poem throughout celebrates the growth and consumption of corn and mush as belonging to sacred ritual;
• 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 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, that "the state is the responsible agent of all men rather than of the privileged class"; Burke's "swinish multitude" is rephrased by Barlow as "pampered pigs", a denigrating term used by "gaudy prigs" ;
• References to American culture are made throughout: the poem contains "an early, sustained use and praise of folklore and folk customs" with context provided by, among others, the writings of "Homespun", popular songs such as "Yankee Doodle", the Ossian cycle, and William Collins's poems on popular superstition.