| RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI | |
| Anno XVI , n° 2, Dicembre 1998 ( Contributi ) | pag. 510-518 |
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| ASPASIA: AN APPRECIATION | |
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| G. SINGH | |
| Queen's University, Belfast |
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Each of Leopardi's poems, as is commonly known, has, for the most part, a thematic as well as a stylistic autonomy. Aspasia is no exception. Among his longer poems dealing with the theme of love - Ultimo canto di Saffo, Il primo amore, Alla sua donna, A Silvia and Il pensiero dominante - it is, both on the sentimental and the stylistic plane, the most effusive as well as the most subjective and autobiographical. Occasioned by Leopardi's unreciprocated love for Aspasia (Fanny Targioni Tozzetti), it is almost a modern love poem, in the sense of a poem such as Meredith's "Modern Love" (although without the elements of bitterness and morbid obsessiveness of the latter) more than in the conventional Dantesque or Petrarchan sense. But it would be wrong as well as reductive to call it merely that. In dealing with the unrequited passion of love - love not so much lost as never possessed (Tennyson's lines "It's better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all"1 would hardly apply to the author of Aspasia) - Leopardi has to come to terms with the bitter-sweet memories of that passion, "the strongest known to humanity"2, as Thomas Hardy calls it, while he is, at least poetically, still under its sway, as evidenced by the tenderly fond yet dramatically charged manner in which he evokes Aspasia, the object of his love, at the very outset of the poem [..]. [...] |
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Rivista di Studi Italiani
Anno XXXVIII, n° 3, Dicembre 2020
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