Laudator Temporis Acti

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Chappaqua: Helen Marx Books, 1999), pp. 121-122, with notes on p. 352:

A great critic of our own time, Professor Momigliano, has referred to the 'sublime poverty' of his style.¹⁷ He was referring, I think, not only to the poet's deliberate restraint and economy of expression, but also to the actual size of his vocabulary—which is surprisingly small. But this 'poverty' was rather like a millionaire's whim to lead the simple life: it was founded upon riches. The years that he had spent in his philological studies, noting down innumerable words and phrases, tracing their origin and their development, had provided him with an unequalled storehouse to draw upon; and it is fascinating to observe the process of rejection and exclusion by which his personal lexicon was formed. He had always maintained that the exclusion of archaisms, as practised by some of his contemporaries and especially by the French, was an unnecessary and mistaken act of self-impoverishment, and there are a number of words which he always preferred to use in their old form. Indeed it was this deliberate use of archaisms, as well as the close web of classical reminiscence, which formed the very texture of his thought, that caused Tommaseo to observe maliciously that Leopardi's work was like a badly scraped palimpsest, in which, beneath the new writing, one can always perceive the old. But beside these archaisms there are a number of familiar, very simple words so frequently used by him, and so often linked to the same adjectives or verbs, that they have almost come to form a personal language. The night is almost always placida or quieta, the moon candida or tacita, solinga or pellegrina; the woods, too (selve, not boschi), are tacite; beauty is fugace or fuggitiva, and so is life (though sometimes, instead, sudata); fate is acerbo or duro; youth l'età verde or il fior degli anni miei, and life 'il viver mio'.¹⁸ Among the most frequent archaisms are speme or spene for speranza (generally linked to tanta or cotanta), desìo for desiderio, dì for giorno, alma for anima, donzella for giovanetta, beltà for bellezza, il sembiante for faccia; illusions are called inganni, errori, larve, fole; a bird is an augello, and a beast a fera; every sword becomes a ferro or a brando, and most houses an ostello. It is the conventional language of Petrarca and Tasso and subsequently of Metastasio, and yet, used by Leopardi's pen, the well-worn phrases undergo a strange alchemy: they are renewed, they become his own.

17. A. Momigliano, La poesia di Leopardi, in a series of lectures at the Lyceum of Florence.

18. Cf. Flora's Preface to his school edition of I Canti e le Prose scelte, pp. 9–14.