Irish Poetry

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith

Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774) started his literary career as a hack writer in London, writing on any subject that would pay enough to keep his creditors at bay. He came to belong to the circle of Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds. His reputation depends mainly on a novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, a play, She Stoops to Conquer, and two long poems, The Traveller and The Deserted Village. The last of these may be the first and best poem by an Irish poet in the English pastoral tradition. It has been variously interpreted as a lament for the death of Irish village life under British rule and a protest at the effects of agricultural reform on the English rural landscape.

Oliver Goldsmith’s poem An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog

Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song; And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long. In Islington there was a man Of whom the world might say, That still a godly race he ran— Whene'er he went to pray.

Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song; And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long. In Islington there was a man Of whom the world might say, That still a godly race he ran— Whene'er he went to pray.
Good people all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,
It cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man

This poem by the Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) is about a rabid dog that bites a man, and the effect that this act of violence has on the people of London.

• This poem by the Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) is about a rabid dog that bites a man, and the effect that this act of violence has on the people of London.

Seamus Justin Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney

Seamus Justin Heaney, (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.