Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is widely considered the greatest Italian poet since Dante, He was a scholar and philosopher whose out standing scholarly and philosophical works and superb poetry place him in the pantheon of great nineteenth-century writers.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In effect Italy's Keats, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is the great 19th-century lyric poet in Italian. Anglo-American expatriate Origo (1902-1986) published her stylish life of the melancholy, lonely hunchback author in 1935 and followed with a revised edition in 1953, as well as with a study of Byron. It remains (but for lack of an index) a useful introduction to the poet, whose career and emotional life were confined by insensitive and strictly religious parents, his spinal disability and poor eyesight that left him half-blind. A tormented, passionate genius, he poured out, in pain, his thwarted hopes for love and freedom and fame in intense, brilliant poetry here extracted in Origo's own translations. His escapes from the family's stifling hill-town palazzo in Recanti to Rome, Florence and Naples were all brief, ending in illness, poverty and finally death in a cholera epidemicAan end he welcomed. Five years earlier, having already given up the prospect of fulfillment, he had written that there were truths men refused to believeA"that they know nothing, and... that they are nothing. And... that there is nothing to hope for after death." Origo evokes the bittersweet, unlived life with sufficient sympathy and clarity to warrant bringing her biography back into print. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Iris Origo, born in America of Anglo-Irish background, moved to Italy as a child. In 1924 she married Antonio Origo, and Italian nobleman; during the German occupation of World War II, they secretly hid Allied prisoners of war. She wrote many books of history, biography, and memoirs.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The gods be thanked...,
By
This review is from: Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Paperback)
I am so grateful to this publisher for having reissued the books of Iris Origo. I first read this book a dozen years ago and it has continued to haunt me since. Origo has created a masterpiece from her tale of Leopardi's short and lonely life. This is a book where the atmosphere is more important than the facts. No poet could object to coming to life, thus, between the lines setting forth Origo's appreciation of his art and sympathy for his suffering. Leopardi can hope for no better chance of literary resurrection than that given to him by Iris Origo. If this biography sends you in search of his poetry it has done its job.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
beautiful and sad book about a tragic but great figure,
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This review is from: Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Paperback)
iris origo really has something here, and her poetic biography of the great giacomo leopardi is a classic in itself. the darkness and despair of leopardi's verse is probably one reason for leopardi's obscurity and little known philosophical works, but the overwhelming sense of nothingness and meaninglessness that his work conveys is no reason to put him aside. we do not necessarily have to agree with an author about everything to enjoy the aesthetic brilliance and the passion present in his essays and poetry. anyone who gets a dark thrill (as i do) from philosophy and poetry that focuses on the more shadowy and sad side of existence will devour leopardi's work. he would undoubtedly gotten along with and befriended the two other great literary prophets of doom, samuel beckett and arthur schopenhauer, and unconsciously shares their philosophy and really disturbing reflections about the emptiness of human life and it's accidental and contingent origin. leopardi was a quite genuine pessimist, unlike schopenhauer who betrayed through his lifestyle and even occasionally in his work itself a love and passion for life and art, and his gloom is not simply temperamental or tongue in cheek as it with arthur, but is very serious and profoundly felt. leopardi's work openly refers to the poetic imagination and man's feelings of divinity or supremacy in the universe as "beautiful illusions", which is all the more infuriating to those who have them because does not violently condemn them or even make an effort to disprove them objectively, but just dismisses them offhandedly as the obvious products of wishful thinking and fanciful self delusion. despite the depressing and sometimes unbearable bleakness of his work, i think giacomo leopardi is unjustly obscure and the best italian poet since dante. all of his work is a must read for students or lovers of philosophy and poetry.
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