Luisa Camaiora

The essays in this book examine the different attitudes of Pope, Gray and Goldsmith towards the concept of ‘virtue’, and document the function and importance of this idea in some of their works, also providing a critical ‘re-visitation’ of the selected texts. They evidence Pope’s defence of personal and social morality and his concern for the decay in literary and artistic values; they present Gray’s problematic reflections on the private and public connotations of virtue; they identify, in Goldsmith, a poet sensitive to the mechanisms of the literary market and aware of the exterior splendour but interior collapse of a nation incessantly engaged in a quest for luxury. The decline of virtue, which Pope so dreaded, finds its nadir in Goldsmith’s prophetic vision of poetry emigrating to new and alien shores.