SOURCE: Sowell, Madison U. “A Comparative Interpretation of Leopardi's ‘La vita solitaria’.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 38, Nos. 1-2 (1984): 44-54.

In the following essay, Sowell explicates the poem “La vita solitaria,” concentrating on Leopardi's use of literary allusion, and on the poem's theme of personal isolation contrasted with artistic communion.

                                                                                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...