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eBook details

• Title: Leopardi's Reception in England: 1837 to 1927 (Giacomo Leopardi) (Critical Essay)
• Author : Italica
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 87 KB

Description

Giacomo Leopardi died in 1837, admired by a mere handful of perceptive Italians, and all but completely unknown throughout the rest of Europe. He had lived in the shadow of Alessandro Manzoni, the author of I promessi sposi, until Francesco de Sanctis, the most powerful critical voice in Italy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, began to rescue Leopardi from virtual oblivion "in numerous studies published between 1849 and 1885" (Barnes xiv). Virtually unknown in England when he died, Leopardi was misunderstood for over fifty years. Leopardi's reception in England during the nineteenth century--when most of his critics separated his poetry from his thought--undermines his reputation to this day. Shortly after Leopardi's death, Giuseppe Mazzini published the first criticism of Leopardi and his work in England. Mazzini's article was distinctly unfavorable and the criticism written in England remained so with some exceptions until Matthew Arnold put Leopardi on the literary map by comparing him to Wordsworth and Byron. In 1927, Geoffrey Bickersteth delivered the Annual Italian Lecture at the Proceedings of the British Academy entitled "Leopardi and Wordsworth" that discussed both poets on equal terms and explained why both were of equivalent importance to their respective cultures, granting them equal poetic and philosophical billing. William Wordsworth died in 1850 and, while he had a larger audience than Leopardi did in 1837, he, too, had suffered neglect, first from living in the shadow of Lord Byron, and then in the 1840s from living long after his poetic powers had ebbed away. Matthew Arnold, a disciple of Wordsworth and Goethe, and "the one major Victorian writer of whom it can be said without metaphor that he was nurtured in the Wordsworthian presence" (Gill 174), asks England and Europe to remember his mentor in his celebrated "Memorial Verses" read at Wordsworth's graveside: "Ah! since dark days still bring to light / Man's prudence and man's fiery might, / Time may restore us in his course / Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; / But where will Europe's latter hour / Again find Wordsworth's healing power?" (1.5863). These lines and virtually the entire poem express the sentiments of much of Victorian society. Arnold's lines imply a keenly held aversion to any rigorously held pessimism, especially if held by a poet who allegedly embodies romanticism. The Victorian attitude toward an uplifting vision, represented by Arnold's "Memorial Verses," suggests their resistance toward Leopardi's poetry.

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