The Deserted Village and the Traveller

The Deserted Village and The Traveller pairs the two long poems by Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), the Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, and playwright whose work moved between the polished eighteenth-century couplet and a quietly elegiac voice that anticipates the Romantics. The Traveller, published 1764, is a meditation on national character written in the manner of Pope. The Deserted Village, published 1770, mourns the depopulation of the English countryside under enclosure and the loss of the village of Auburn, widely identified with Lissoy in County Westmeath where Goldsmith spent his boyhood. The two poems together secured Goldsmith’s place in the standard English poetic canon and were among the most reprinted didactic poems of the late eighteenth century. Goldsmith also wrote the novel The Vicar of Wakefield and the play She Stoops to Conquer. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.