A Comparative Interpretation of Leopardi's "La Vita Solitaria"

A Comparative Interpretation of Leopardi's "La Vita Solitaria" Madison U. Sovvell Brigham Young University O'er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or black desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields. Wordsworth, The Prelude Through the eighteenth century only four poets stand at the apex of the Italian Parnassus: Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. Although other poets of renown arise between the Trecento and the Settecento — e. g., Pulci, Politian, Boiardo, Marino, and Parini — none approaches these four in the making of beautiful and meaningful verse. Then, in the nineteenth century, Count Giacomo Leopardi becomes the fifth member "tra cotanto senno," to borrow Dante's phrase when he numbers himself among the great intellects of all times (Inferno IV. 102). According to many critics the Count of Recanati ranks second only to the great Florentine exile himself in terms of poetic production.1 Yet in 1. Leopardi's high ranking is true in spite of the fact that he is almost unknown among non-Italian readers in this country compared to their knowledge of Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso. Fortunately, this situation is changing. In recent years several important studies have appeared in the United States and Great Britain. An essential English bibliography of Leopardi would include the following: Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953); J. H. Whitfield, Giacomo Leopardi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954); G. Singh, Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964); Karl Kroeber, The Artifice of Reality: Poetic Style in Wordsworth, Foseólo, Keats, and Leopardi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964); Nesca A. Robb, Four in Exile: Critical Essays on Leopardi, Hans C. Andersen, Christina Rossetti, A. E. Housman (Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1968), pp. 55-81; Nicolas James Perella, Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Stephen Rogers, Classical Greece and the Poetry of Chenier, Shelley, and Leopardi (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp. 133-90; and Ottavio M. Cásale, ed. and trans., A Leopardi Reader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). All quotations of "La vita solitaria" come from the following edition: Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, ed. Fernando Bandini (Milano: Garzanti, 1975). Madison U. Sowell45 philosophical orientation and in outlook on life — the pessimist Schopenhauer referred to Leopardi's philosophy as an anticipation of his own — the Count could hardly be more removed from Dante or from any other of Italy's best Christian poets. The view of Leopardi as a very isolated figure stems from the poet's autobiographical reflections on his sheltered youth and from the theme of solitary suffering recurrent in so many of his poems. Notwithstanding a perhaps popular acceptance of this vision, I am convinced that one of the best methods for interpreting Leopardi's poetry lies in a comparative approach. For even when the poet appears to be making his most personal expression of anguish, he is inevitably and consciously drawing on the poetic traditions which precede and are contemporaneous to him.2 My purpose, therefore, in this article is to detail that the brilliance of Leopardi's statement on the solitary life derives, in no little part, from what is for him a spiritual communion with other poets. "La vita solitaria" is not the spontaneous expression ofpain in solitude that it might seem to a first-time reader of Leopardi — indeed spontaneity is an inappropriate word to use when speaking of a man who painstakingly revised his manuscripts. Rather this particular poem is a highly original fusion of wide-ranging sources, from classical poets to Petrarch to Parini to Thomas Gray, and a skillful elaboration of a familiar Romantic theme. In what follows I also hope to demonstrate that the poem in question has an internal unity which has been glossed over in the past. The lines from William Wordsworth's verse autobiography which preface this essay strike chords whose echoes only seem to resound in "La vita solitaria." In reality, Wordsworth never exerted great, if any, direct influence on his Mediterranean contemporary. But parallels in the two works point towards Romantic trends...