Chapter 36 - Afterlives 3: Poetry

Summary

Almost immediately after its publication in 1770, writers recognized The Deserted Village as a politically radical poem. This view is reflected in several imitations published in Britain in the decades immediately following. Writers in the British colonies in North America and the early United States adapted the poem to other ends, replacing the temporal relationship between the two Auburns in Goldsmith’s poem with a spatial relationship. This substitution allowed them to read The Deserted Village as a description of England and the Auburn of old as a representation of the promise of the emerging nation. This chapter traces the afterlife of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, his only poem to have had a considerable influence on other poets, from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reworkings in Britain and America through to contemporary reimaginings by Irish poets.