Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” has drawn the attention of English readers for its lyrical quality and poetic perfectness. However, the more important reason that the work deserves a critical attention is its poignant social criticism. The eighteenth-century English society welcomed with enthusiasm the wealth coming through foreign trade, but Goldsmith blames the newly emerging merchant class for acquiring extensive land to accommodate their luxurious life, thereby causing devastation and depopulation of rural areas. Goldsmith emphasizes that the rapid growth of trade and mercantilism, though it may seem to make Britain rich and strong, will prove disastrous for Britain by destroying the peasant class. Therefore, Goldsmith considers it his role as a poet to enlighten and educate the English people on the issues. In making a critique of trade and mercantilism, Goldsmith creates a poetic self who detaches himself from people and, alone in rural landscape, contemplates on the social changes that the contemporary English society was experiencing. His poetic self speaks in a pastoral mode, but not of comfort and abundance of country life but of the very lack of them, subverting the neoclassical poetic conventions.