ABSTRACT
Goldsmith’s claims to historical accuracy in The Deserted Village have long been contested, his sentimental evocations of a lost Eden and his censure of the self-profiteering that has resulted in Auburn’s decline written off as inauthentic or as attempts to apply outworn pastoral conventions to present times. As Goldsmith searches for a mode to replace the pastoral, which, as for Duck and Crabbe, has proved insufficient to address the concerns of his day, he reverts, in apparent despair, to silence, unable to counter the claims of history and change, which have decimated the human values Goldsmith holds dear: community, voice, a sense of personal place. In exploring the relationship of self to place and the emotional experience of loss in the face of change as well as the insufficiency of poetry in addressing such change, Goldsmith’s poem looks forward to Smith’s Beachy Head, though the relationship of Goldsmith’s persona to Goldsmith himself raises issues of authenticity that Smith’s work does not.
