Doug, thanks for that post / excerpt from Raymond Williams. I've wanted to learn more of the context of Goldsmith's work. I know Goldsmith wrote more about the environment, an essay perhaps, but have lost the cite. Now I'm energized to locate that. Gene >Eugene P. Coyle wrote: > >>One of the earliest environmental pieces is by Oliver Goldsmith about the >>expropriation of another commons: >> >>from The Deserted Village > >Raymond Williams says of this in The Country & the City: > >If it is only the social history of the village that is in question, this >simultaneous eviction of poetry is undeniably curious. But what happens is >that from the intense personal situation, in which the independence of the >poet is insufficient to maintain his life, and in which all the humanity he >claims to represent is crushed and driven out by the coarse and unfeeling >order of the new rich, a landscape extends, which is that of the village >suffering a similar ignominy. The rural dispossession is, as we have seen, >incisively observed. Its >facts are present, palpably, in their own right. Yet the dispossession is >subject, also, to another process; what I have called elsewhere, in >relation to Gissing and Orwell, a negative identification. That is to say, >the exposure and suffering of the writer, in his own social situation, are >identified with the facts of a social history that is beyond him. It is not >that he cannot then see the real social history; he is often especially >sensitive to it, as a present fact. But the identification between his own >suffering and that of a social group beyond him is inevitably negative, in >the end. The present is accurately and powerfully seen, but its real >relations, to past and future, are inaccessible, because the governing >development is that of the writer himself: a feeling about the past, an >idea about the future, into which, by what is truly an intersection, an >observed present is arranged. We need not doubt the warmth of Goldsmith's >feelings about the men driven from their village: that connection is >definite. The structure becomes ambiguous only when this shared feeling is >extended to memory and imagination, for what takes over then, in language >and idea, is a different pressure: the social history of the writer. Thus >the nostalgic portraits of parson and schoolmaster are of men independent >and honoured in their own place, supported by a whole way of living in >which independence and community are actual. Against this selfdependent >power, which is also that of the poet, the encroachment of wealth and >fashion is fatal. Yet to be a poet is, ironically, to be a pastoral poet: >the social condition of poetry-it is as far as Goldsmith gets-is the >idealised pastoral economy. The destruction of one is, or is made to stand >for, the destruction of the other. And then the village itself becomes a >pastoral and a poetic mode: its expropriation is assigned to the general >vices of wealth and luxury. Thus it is very significant that the old >village was both happy and productive, while the new condition is both >unhappy and unproductive- > > One only master grasps the whole domain, > And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain, > No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, > But choked with sedges, works its weedy way; > Along thy glades, a solitary guest, > The hollow sounding bittern guards its nest; > Amidst thy desert walk the lapwing flies > And tires their echoes with unvaried cries. > >It would indeed be easy if the social process were really that. But the >actual history, in which the destruction of old social relations was >accompanied by an increased use and fertility of the land, is overridden by >the imaginative process in which, when the pastoral order is destroyed, >creation is 'stinted', the brook is 'choked', the cry of the bittern is >'hollow', the lapwing's cries 'unvaried'. This creation of a 'desert' >landscape is an imaginative rather than a social process; it is what the >new order does to the poet, not to the land. The memory of'sweet Auburn' is >of a kind of community, a kind of feeling, and a kind of verse, which are >no longer able to survive, under the pressure of'trade's unfeeling train', >but which equally cannot be gone beyond, into new relationship and >imagination; which can only go into exile and a desperate protest, beyond >history- > > Still let thy voice, prevailing over time, > Redress the rigours of th' inclement clime. > >It is exiled poetry, at the end of The Deserted Village, which must teach, >hopefully: > > That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, > As oceans sweep the labour'd mole away; > While selfdependent power can time defy, > As rocks resist the billows and the sky. > >Here, with unusual precision, what we can later call a Romantic structure >of feeling-the assertion of nature against industry and of poetry against >trade; the isolation of humanity and community into the idea of culture, >against the real social pressures of the time - is projected. We can catch >its echoes, exactly, in Blake, in Wordsworth, and in Shelley.