Study In Solitude

Giacomo Leopardi is widely considered the greatest Italian poet since Dante. Writer, philosopher, essayist and philologist, he was one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century. An engaging, highly readable biographer, Origo brings us Leopardi the poet, but also Leopardi the nineteeth-century romantic par excellence - a precocious genius who had written tragedies, poetry, and philosophical treatises by the age of sixteen and who later suffered debilitating illness (he called himself a walking sepulchre). Iris Origo's masterful biography is an incisive psychological portrait of the melancholy, semi-cloistered, hunchback poet whose genius, pain, and frustrated hopes found their outlet in poetry admired for its brilliance, intensity and seemingly effortless musicality.