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Articles

Volume 15, Number 1 (1990)

Oliver Goldsmith and The Rising Village

  • D.M.R. Bentley
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1990-01-01

Abstract

The Rising Village was fairly well-received both in England and in Canada, although it never achieved for Oliver Goldsmith the literary reputation which he craved. Modern critics such as Desmond Pacey have been relatively harsh in their appraisal of the poem. It can be examined through the then-popular "four stages theory" of civilization -- hunting, herding, agriculture, and ultimately trading -- of which Goldsmith would probably have been aware. In a sense, Goldsmith seems to favour the third stage, agriculture, because the final, commercial stage is fraught with moral dangers: these dangers are explicated quite carefully in The Rising Village. The poem's structure and syntax attempts to emulate the comfortably delineated and humanized world of agrarian Nova Scotia.