Customer Reviews

Leopardi: A Study in Solitude

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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.

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.