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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith," the reader is offered a comprehensive exploration of Goldsmith's literary genius, showcasing his remarkable versatility as a poet. Spanning pastoral poetry, comic verse, and deeper philosophical reflections, this collection reveals Goldsmith's mastery of language and form. His lyrical dexterity, imbued with a blend of humor and poignant observation, reflects the transitional period of the 18th century, straddling the worlds of neoclassicism and romanticism. Goldsmith's ability to capture the essence of human experience resonates through his vibrant imagery and rhythmic finesse, placing him firmly in the context of his contemporaries and cementing his legacy in English literature. Oliver Goldsmith, an Irish writer and poet, is celebrated not only for his poetry but also for his contributions to drama and prose. His diverse background, from his rural upbringing in Ireland to his extensive travels across Europe, profoundly influenced his worldview. This rich tapestry of experiences is evident in his writings, where themes of nature, societal norms, and the human condition intertwine, reflecting both the struggles and joys of his own life. I highly recommend "The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith" to both scholars and casual readers alike. This collection serves as an essential resource for understanding the evolution of poetry during a pivotal time in literary history. For those intrigued by the intersection of humor, pathos, and humanism, Goldsmith's works are both enlightening and enjoyable. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers, in a single, coherent presentation, the complete poetical works of Oliver Goldsmith. Its purpose is to make accessible the full range of his verse, from the celebrated long poems that shaped his reputation to shorter, occasional pieces that reveal his craft in miniature. By bringing canonical and lesser-known works together, the collection allows readers to trace Goldsmith’s poetic voice across subjects and forms, and to situate him within the broader currents of eighteenth-century literature. It is designed to serve both as a reading edition and as a reliable point of reference, with contextual aids that support informed and sustained engagement.
The contents reflect the breadth of Goldsmith’s poetic practice. They include major descriptive poems, a dedicated presentation of The Deserted Village, lyrical and miscellaneous pieces, and The Captivity, an oratorio text conceived for performance. The shorter poems encompass songs, prologues, epigrams, epitaphs, and occasional verses written for public and private moments. While Goldsmith was also a novelist, playwright, and essayist, this collection is confined to his poetry, complemented by a chronology and appendixes. The arrangement highlights both the variety of genres he employed and the continuity of voice that links his public and personal modes of expression.
Several unifying concerns run through these works. Goldsmith’s poetry habitually seeks the moral center of social life: the claims of community, the obligations of sympathy, the precarious balance between prosperity and virtue. His descriptive landscapes double as ethical reflections, turning scenes of travel or rural quiet into meditations on happiness, loss, and belonging. A humane temper animates even his satire, moderating judgment with compassion. As a whole, the poems exemplify the clarity and measure of Augustan art while anticipating later tastes for sentiment and introspection, which helps explain their continuing appeal to readers across periods and traditions.
Goldsmith’s stylistic hallmarks are immediately recognizable. He favors lucid diction, graceful transitions, and a musical line that rewards reading aloud. His mastery of the couplet is notable for its ease: rather than displaying technical bravura, it carries an apparently effortless balance of thought and image. Figures and allusions are applied lightly, in service of feeling and argument rather than ostentation. Descriptive passages tend to crystallize into moral insight, yet the poems avoid dogmatism by preserving a conversational warmth. The result is a tone at once polished and intimate, capable of embracing public themes without losing the textures of everyday experience.
At the center of the collection stands The Deserted Village, Goldsmith’s most widely known poem and a touchstone of eighteenth-century verse. It is a reflective lament for a rural community altered beyond recognition, composed in a stately yet tender cadence. Without resting on single causes or solutions, the poem evokes the human costs of change, dwelling on memory, attachment, and the fragile economies of kindness that bind neighbors into a village. Its enduring power lies less in argument than in sympathy: a feeling for lives displaced and affections unsettled, expressed through images that have become part of the language of social reflection.
The descriptive poems, taken together, reveal Goldsmith’s distinctive method of ethical observation. They treat landscapes and nations as mirrors in which the fortunes of people and the character of communities can be discerned. A wide survey of manners coexists with modesty of judgment: the speaker observes, weighs, and compares rather than prescribes. The perspective is cosmopolitan yet anchored by everyday detail, keeping sentiment tied to tangible scenes. This mode, which includes The Traveller alongside The Deserted Village, helped consolidate the philosophical travel poem and set a pattern for later writers who sought to measure public well-being against lived experience.
The lyrical and miscellaneous pieces show Goldsmith in a different register—compact, occasional, and often playful. Here one finds songs of friendship and parting, epigrams that tease with gentle wit, prologues and epilogues written for the theater, and brief meditations that distill his humane outlook into a handful of lines. These poems illuminate the sociable contexts in which he wrote, from literary circles to the playhouse, and display a tact for tone that made his work at once companionable and memorable. Their variety complements the large-scale canvases, revealing a poet attentive to small felicities as well as broad moral vistas.
The Captivity introduces a dramatic dimension to the collection. Conceived as an oratorio text, it adapts a biblical subject for public performance, balancing narrative momentum with choral reflection. The poem’s structure—alternating solo voices and collective utterance—allows Goldsmith to explore suffering, hope, and deliverance in a form designed to engage both ear and conscience. Its language is dignified yet affective, sustaining the clarity of statement typical of his work while accommodating the heightened atmosphere of the stage. Placed alongside the descriptive and lyric poems, it broadens our sense of his range and his understanding of poetry’s civic and ceremonial functions.
A detailed chronology accompanies the poems to orient readers in Goldsmith’s life and times and to mark the sequence of composition and publication. It situates the poetry within an evolving career, indicating how themes matured and were revisited across different contexts. By aligning personal circumstance with literary output, the chronology encourages a layered reading: developments in form and subject can be seen against the backdrop of changing social and artistic environments. Such temporal framing is not prescriptive but illuminating, offering a scaffold on which readers may trace continuities and departures without reducing the poems to mere biography.
The appendixes, arranged in several parts, provide supporting materials that clarify, contextualize, and enrich the poems. They assemble information useful to readers who wish to probe questions of wording, reference, and reception, and they point toward the cultural and literary frameworks that shaped Goldsmith’s choices. Without displacing the poems from center stage, these resources enable closer scrutiny of the text and a better grasp of the conversations—literary, historical, and moral—in which it participates. Taken together with the chronology, they form a compact apparatus designed to facilitate careful reading and to encourage informed appreciation.
Considered as a whole, Goldsmith’s poetry remains significant for its balance of moral seriousness and accessible grace. It speaks with authority about shared human concerns while resisting the heaviness that often accompanies didactic aims. The poems’ clarity has helped them endure in classrooms and anthologies, yet their art lies in more than lucidity: they refine feeling without draining it of life. They also mark an important moment in English-language verse, mediating between a classical ideal of order and a growing emphasis on individual sensibility. In this negotiation, Goldsmith achieved a voice that continues to sound timely and humane.
Readers may choose to begin with The Deserted Village and then range outward to the descriptive poems, the compact lyrics, and the ceremonial strength of The Captivity. However approached, the collection invites slow reading and, where possible, reading aloud, to honor the cadence that carries its thought. Attend to the interplay between image and moral inference, to the way a village scene becomes a meditation, or a friendly epigram a measure of character. Across settings and scales, the poems encourage a generous attention to others and to place. That attentive spirit is the thread that unites this complete gathering of his verse.
Author Biography
Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist of the later eighteenth century. Working across genres, he bridged the Augustan ideal of polished clarity with a growing sensibility for pathos and social sympathy. His reputation rests on a compact body of enduring works: the novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the poems The Traveller and The Deserted Village, and the comedy She Stoops to Conquer. Goldsmith’s prose is noted for ease and lucidity, while his imaginative writing balances moral reflection with comic verve. He is often read as a humane satirist, alert to the costs of luxury and the value of community.
Raised in rural Ireland, Goldsmith received a classical education at Trinity College Dublin, where the curriculum of rhetoric, Latin, and moral philosophy shaped his taste for Augustan models such as Addison and Pope. In the early 1750s he pursued medical studies at the University of Edinburgh and continued them in the Netherlands, an experience that broadened his acquaintance with European languages and letters. He traveled on the Continent before settling in London, later drawing on those impressions in essays and poems. The combination of classical training and cosmopolitan observation contributed to his characteristic voice: urbane yet accessible, skeptical of pedantry, and attentive to everyday manners.
Goldsmith began his London career amid the bustling print culture of Grub Street, supporting himself through journalism, translation, and compilation. He launched the short‑lived periodical The Bee and wrote essays and reviews for magazines. An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe surveyed the institutions and fashions of learning with a mixture of criticism and wit. His Chinese‑letter essays, collected as The Citizen of the World, adopted the persona of an observant outsider to reflect on British society. These works established his public voice: graceful, idiomatic prose, moral without dogmatism, and a talent for turning social observation into gently corrective satire.
As a poet, Goldsmith achieved distinction with The Traveller, a reflective tour in verse that weighs national manners and the pursuit of happiness. It was followed by The Deserted Village, an elegy for a disrupted rural world that made his name with a broad readership and entered the cultural vocabulary. Between these poems he published The Vicar of Wakefield, a domestic novel that blends comic mishap with patient ethical sentiment. Contemporary responses varied in emphasis, but many readers admired its warmth, narrative poise, and unforced morality. Together these works confirmed Goldsmith as a writer who could move readers while maintaining stylistic economy.
Goldsmith also sought success on the stage. The Good‑Natur’d Man, produced in the late 1760s, met with moderate favor, but it sharpened his views on contemporary drama. With She Stoops to Conquer he offered a buoyant alternative to the prevailing mode of sentimental comedy, restoring farcical energy, misrecognition, and robust character to the repertoire. The play was an immediate theatrical triumph and long remained a staple of the English stage. Its comic surfaces mask a precise understanding of politeness, class display, and generational expectation, themes that link the drama to his broader interest in manners and the moral texture of everyday life.
Alongside his major works, Goldsmith produced a steady stream of prose aimed at general readers. His popular histories of England and Rome, as well as An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, exemplify his gift for synthesis and clear exposition. Although sometimes criticized for inaccuracies by later scholars, these compendia offered accessible narratives at a time of expanding literacy and helped secure his livelihood in the competitive book trade. The same lucidity informs shorter essays and biographies, whose balanced judgments and humane tone extended his reach beyond the theater and the lyric, shaping his reputation as a versatile man of letters.
In his later years Goldsmith moved at the center of London’s literary circles, notably in the company of Samuel Johnson and associates often referred to as The Club. His late poem Retaliation, affectionate and incisive in its portraits of friends, displays the sociable wit that marked his conversation. He died in London in the mid‑1770s, leaving a compact oeuvre whose variety belies its relatively brief span. Today his works are read for their stylistic grace and humane critique: The Deserted Village for its meditation on economic change, She Stoops to Conquer for comic vitality, and The Vicar of Wakefield for durable warmth and irony.
Historical Context
Oliver Goldsmith’s poetic career unfolded amid the long eighteenth century’s transition from Augustan poise to early Romantic feeling. Born in 1730 and dying in 1774, he wrote under the Hanoverian monarchs George II and George III, when Britain’s empire expanded after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the public sphere swelled with newspapers and coffeehouses, and polite letters negotiated the shift from aristocratic patronage to commercial print. His poems, from expansive description to occasional verse, register the debates of prosperity and virtue, city and countryside, cosmopolitan travel and national character. The Complete Poetical Works encapsulate a life that bridged Ireland and London, scholarship and stage, moral reflection and social satire.
Goldsmith’s Irish formation shaped his sensibility. He was born at Pallas, County Longford, and grew up at Lissoy in County Westmeath, where his father, the Reverend Charles Goldsmith, ministered in an Anglican parish within a predominantly Catholic countryside governed by the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. The rhythms of fairs, hedge-school learning, rural music, and parish sociability, as well as the precariousness of tenants under improving landlords, fed his later depictions of village life. The memory of Lissoy—transmuted into the emblematic “Auburn”—became a touchstone for meditations on community, loss, and migration, themes that recur across his descriptive and lyrical pieces and informed his critique of luxury and depopulation.
Educated in the mixed traditions of Irish and Scottish Enlightenment learning, Goldsmith entered Trinity College Dublin in 1745 and, after graduating, studied medicine at Edinburgh in 1752–1753 and at Leiden in 1754. His subsequent pedestrian tour through France, Flanders, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy (1755–1756) exposed him to contrasting political economies and manners, from Dutch commerce to Swiss republicanism and Italian artistic heritage. These experiences nourished his habit of national comparison and his skepticism toward simple equations of wealth with happiness. The Continental journey also refined his descriptive eye and ear for local custom, which he later deployed in panoramic poems, ballads with travel frames, and morally inflected sketches of character and place.
Arriving in London by 1756, Goldsmith entered Grub Street’s precarious marketplace, where authors lived by reviews, compilations, translations, and periodical essays. He taught at Dr. Milner’s school in Peckham, tried medical practice, and wrote for booksellers such as John Newbery and Ralph Griffiths. Ventures like The Bee (1759) and the Chinese letters later collected as The Citizen of the World (1762) honed his aphoristic clarity and humane irony. The city’s coffeehouses, lending libraries, and circulating magazines furnished topics and audiences, while the economics of payment by the sheet, tight deadlines, and editorial gatekeeping impressed upon him the value of concision, polish, and versatility evident throughout his poetical oeuvre.
Goldsmith’s membership in Samuel Johnson’s circle anchored him within London’s elite culture of conversation and taste. The Literary Club, founded in 1764 at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street, united figures such as Johnson, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and David Garrick. Within this milieu, dedications and occasional pieces carried social meaning: The Deserted Village (1770) was dedicated to Reynolds, while The Traveller (1764) honored his brother Henry. Epigrams, epitaphs, prologues, and verses to friends captured the clubbable interplay of wit and moral portraiture. The salon and the stage thus intersected with print, sustaining a sociable poetics that balanced public argument with private affection.
Formally, Goldsmith blended Augustan craft with the aesthetics of sensibility. He inherited the tight heroic couplet of Dryden and Pope, the descriptive amplitude of James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), and the elegiac meditation of Thomas Gray’s 1751 poem, while absorbing the revived interest in balladry spurred by Bishop Percy’s Reliques (1765). His verse mediates between rhetorical polish and plainness, often favoring measured couplets that carry colloquial warmth, or ballads whose narrative simplicity conceals ethical reflection. That stylistic poise—equally at home in panoramic description, conversational epistle, pastoral scene, or occasional address—allowed him to speak lucidly to a broad readership traversing the new commercial and civic institutions of culture.
The international context after 1763 sharpened Goldsmith’s comparative imagination. Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War with enlarged imperial holdings, a national debt, and confidence tinged by moral anxiety. The Traveller (1764) surveys Italy, Switzerland, France, Holland, and Britain to test whether commerce, liberty, and luxury conduce to happiness. Debates by David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Montesquieu concerning luxury, civic virtue, and climate provided an intellectual backdrop, while Adam Smith’s later Wealth of Nations (1776) would crystallize questions Goldsmith had already dramatized poetically. The poem’s balanced verdicts—suspicious of extremes, wary of pride—echo across his other works whenever he contrasts polite refinement with social cohesion.
Transformations in the eighteenth-century countryside furnished the moral scenery for Goldsmith’s descriptive verse. Enclosure Acts, landscape gardening under Lancelot “Capability” Brown, consolidation of estates, and shifts from subsistence to market agriculture altered village economies. Absentee landlords and rack-rents in Ireland, along with eviction and emigration to Britain or America, became common experiences. These forces underwrite the pathos that informs his imagined “Auburn,” where the loss of common rights and communal rituals signals a deeper dislocation. Rather than nostalgic escapism, his pastoral becomes a critique of modernization without humanity, a plea for stewardship and mutual obligation that resonates throughout the descriptive and miscellaneous poems.
London’s explosive growth—approaching three-quarters of a million inhabitants by the 1770s—offered both spectacle and cautionary tale. Pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, masquerades, lotteries, and a credit-fueled consumer economy cultivated tastes that Goldsmith found morally ambivalent. The same urban abundance that enabled polite sociability also bred imposture, impoverishment, and solitude. His periodical sketches and lighter poems anatomize foppery, charlatanry, and philanthropic fashion, yet rarely without pity for victims of the city’s indifference. The metropolis becomes a counterpoint to the village: ingenious, glittering, and unstable. This dialectic—city versus country, display versus substance—structures the ethical horizon of the poetical works as a whole.
Goldsmith’s engagement with the stage and with music situates him within London’s vibrant performance culture. Handel’s oratorios had made sacred narratives a staple of public concerts at venues like Covent Garden before his death in 1759. Composers such as Thomas Arne and Felice Giardini continued the tradition of English-language oratorio and song. Goldsmith’s The Captivity, cast in the biblical key of exile and deliverance, aligns with this mid-century taste for moral uplift outside liturgy. His prologues and songs, written for theatrical productions managed by figures like George Colman and Garrick, further attest to porous boundaries between page and stage, where verse acquired voice, gesture, and audience.
Eighteenth-century curiosity about Asia, the Near East, and global trade extended Goldsmith’s horizons beyond Europe. The East India Company’s ascendancy, chinoiserie in design, and Jesuit travel reports fed a popular Orientalism that he approached with satiric sympathy. In The Citizen of the World (1760–1761) he adopted the persona of Lien Chi Altangi, whose outsider’s vantage on London manners sharpened moral judgment without xenophobia. That humane cosmopolitanism—recognizing both the universality and the limits of custom—echoes in poems that contemplate empire, captivity, and migration. His verse thus participates in a broader eighteenth-century effort to reconcile global awareness with a stable ethical common sense.
Goldsmith’s didactic bent reflects the era’s fusion of instruction and entertainment. Employed by John Newbery—the innovative publisher of juvenile literature—he produced histories of Rome (1769) and England (1771) whose narrative clarity spills into his poems’ moralizing grace. Sentimental ballads such as The Hermit, also known as Edwin and Angelina (first printed in 1765), exemplify the age’s tenderness tempered by wit. Songs embedded in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and other occasional verses show how lyric interludes could carry ethical maxims to mixed audiences. Philanthropic institutions, including the Magdalen Hospital, supplied occasions and language for public virtue that his poems variously echo or interrogate.
The political climate of the 1760s and early 1770s—marked by the Wilkes agitation (after No. 45 of The North Briton in 1763), disputes over general warrants, and colonial taxation crises—made the press a battleground of liberty and reputation. Goldsmith generally sidestepped direct partisan polemic, adopting instead the stance of the moral spectator who exposes the social costs of wealth and power. His temper, akin to Johnson’s humane Toryism and Burke’s defense of social bond, resists both radical novelty and complacent privilege. Images of migration and estrangement in his poetry acquired fresh resonance as American tensions sharpened after 1765, hinting at fractures within Britain’s purported prosperity.
The print economy shaped both the making and the transmission of Goldsmith’s verse. The Statute of Anne (1710) provided a framework for literary property, but booksellers’ control, payment by the sheet, and aggressive reprinting defined authors’ livelihoods. Goldsmith’s precarious finances, including arrests for debt in the mid-1760s, left traces in the opportunistic variety of his output—prologues, epistles, epitaphs, and songs often tailored to immediate patrons or managers. Successive editions introduced revisions, while periodical first printings generated textual variants. The apparatus of a complete poetical works—notes, sources, and variants—therefore records a collaborative economy in which author, editor, printer, and performer shaped what readers finally received.
Goldsmith’s final years mixed theatrical triumph with physical and financial strain. She Stoops to Conquer opened in 1773 at Covent Garden to great acclaim, reviving his fortunes and yielding commissions for prologues and verses. He died on 4 April 1774 in his rooms at Brick Court, Middle Temple, and was buried in the Temple Churchyard. A monument by Joseph Nollekens in Westminster Abbey bears Johnson’s Latin epitaph, memorializing the poet’s harmony of simplicity and polish. Friends circulated elegiac tributes and anecdotes, while booksellers gathered posthumous poems and fragments. That commemorative moment established the canon from which later editors constructed chronological narratives and appendices.
The reception of Goldsmith’s poetry traversed ideological lines in Britain, Ireland, and the Atlantic world. Conservatives prized his defense of social order and village piety; radicals cited his laments over enclosure and luxury to indict oligarchic privilege. In Ireland, the identification of Auburn with Lissoy fed readings of colonial extraction; in the young United States, The Deserted Village entered debates about commerce and republican virtue. Romantic poets admired his plain style and moral warmth even as writers like George Crabbe challenged his pastoral ideality. By the nineteenth century, schools and anthologies cemented his status as a model of clarity, humane satire, and elegiac tenderness.
The modern configuration of The Complete Poetical Works reflects nineteenth- and twentieth-century editorial practice: introductions framing life and art, chronologies aligning dates and venues, and appendices presenting sources, variants, and contextual documents. Such apparatus links dedications (to Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1770; to Henry Goldsmith in 1764), performance settings, and periodical first printings with the poems as read today. It also situates pieces like The Captivity within musical culture and occasional verses within theatrical networks. By setting the oeuvre against the century’s major movements—Enlightenment inquiry, commercial society, imperial expansion, and rural change—the collection’s scholarly scaffolding restores the historical dialogue that Goldsmith’s poetry always sought to sustain.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
Sets the historical and literary context for Goldsmith’s poetry, surveying his life, principal themes, and the editorial approach adopted in the volume.
Chronology of Goldsmith's Life and Poems
A timeline of major biographical events and publication dates that situates each poem within Goldsmith’s career and the period’s cultural climate.
Descriptive Poems (primarily The Traveller)
A reflective survey poem that journeys across European nations to compare manners, governments, and sources of public happiness, culminating in a tempered argument for balance and moderation.
The Deserted Village
A pastoral elegy lamenting the depopulation of the rural village of Auburn, contrasting remembered communal virtues with the social and economic forces driving displacement and decline.
Lyrical and Miscellaneous Pieces
A varied selection of songs, ballads, epistles, epigrams, epitaphs, prologues, and occasional verses that range from moral reflection and satire to friendship and sentiment (including pieces like The Hermit and Retaliation).
The Captivity
A biblical-themed oratorio dramatizing the Israelites in Babylon, moving from lament and oppression toward hope for deliverance and restoration.
Appendixes (A–F)
Editorial materials providing sources, textual variants, annotations, contemporary responses, and related documents that clarify composition, publication, and reception.
