BOOKS
283
LEOPARDI IN SOLITUDE
LEOF'ARDI. By Iris Origo. British Book Centre. $6.00.
Why is it that in the present--one almost says "American"–
half-century, the poetry, the life of Giacomo Leopardi, the Italian poet,
born in the very small city of Recanati, a few miles inland from the
Adriatic, who died, age thirty-nine, in 1837, have a particular, a poig–
nant affinity to us? How do these bones and dust, relics and words in
fragmentary translation, all so definitely Italian, romantic in their feel–
ing, more than half classical in accent, still stir to life at a transatlantic
distance? What is their meaning?
A clue to answering these questions may be found in Iris Origo's
second and revised edition of her biography of Leopardi, which has
the air of being a life work and is one of the best lives of a poet written
in the twentieth century; it is that rare book: a work of scholarship that
is a work of art. Beyond Iris Origo's researches it is unlikely that further
meaningful documents concerning Leopardi will be unearthed; in the
best sense of the term she has written the definitive life which she has
subtitled "A Study in Solitude." It is the poet in solitude that she
presents, and placing them behind him, she also provides the details
of his environment, the characters of his father and mother, the Palazzo
Leopardi in Recanati where he was born and where he was held, bound
by ties of illness and attachments of parental love, hate and indifference,
until he was twenty-four. However far he ventured to escape, whether
to Rome, Florence, Pisa, or at last to Naples, he remained the semi–
clerical nobleman and child of provincial Recanati, always in need of
parental care,
iII
to the point of deformity, often pedantic in conversa–
tion, never at ease in urban society-and because of his unpressed
clothes, his unwashed linen-he was an embarrassment whenever he ap–
proached a woman.
As in his life, so in his poetry his excuses for being were fought
out alone: within him were the conflicts of the wiII-to-death against
the instinct to survive his illnesses; sexual passion without fulfillment
against images of vicarious love; the delights of learning, even to the
pedantry of exact scholarship, against the impulse to write a poem and
create within it a vision of the world. The will to break through the net
of parental attachments, (which included his father's desire to make
him a priest) was placed against the need for personal care-and to
these were added the fears of ridicule, the conflicts of being an Italian
nationalist and an individualist who leaned in favor of republicanism.
All these combined to make him the classless figure of a poet, an aristo-
