LEOPARDI, GIACOMO

LEOPARDI, GIACOMO (1798–1837), Italian poet.

The greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century, Giacomo Leopardi was born in Recanati, a small town in the Papal States, during the turmoil of the revolutionary triennium (1796–1799). His father, Monaldo, epitomized the provincial aristocrat of reactionary political convictions. Yet he was also keenly interested in the arts and sciences and provided his son with a ten-thousand volume library and a dispensation to read books on the Index (the Catholic Church's list of prohibited books). A child prodigy with immense classical erudition as well as a profound knowledge of contemporary European culture, Giacomo was already a remarkable philologist in his teens. Confined within the boundaries of a provincial existence and of an oppressive family life until his early twenties, he then left his "barbaric native town" and cultivated friendships with important intellectuals in his several stays in Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Rome, and Naples, where he spent the last years of his life in the company of his fellow writer Antonio Ranieri.

The first collection of his poetic works, Canzoni, was published in 1824 in a style still burdened by the classical tradition. It included poems inspired by civic-patriotic sentiments ("To Italy," "On the Monument of Dante") as well as compositions that prefigured the themes of his full maturity, in particular the unhappiness of human beings unable to fulfill the very desires that nature places in their hearts. Other poems cast in a fresher language and imbued with a powerful elegiac intonation and a Romantic sensibility (most famously "The Infinite") were published in 1825 and 1826; the first collection of his poetic production, the Canti, came out in Florence in 1831. Leopardi composed two more poems after that year, one of which, entitled "Broom, or the Flower of the Desert," is considered his poetic testament and a testimony to his final humanism. In the mid-1820s he also began publishing his important Operette morali, short and elegant moral-philosophical essays mostly in the form of dialogues laying out his cosmic materialism and pessimism. A collection of aphorisms, Pensieri (Reflections), was published in 1845.

His other writings include "Discorso sullo stato presente dei costumi degli italiani" (1906; Discourse on the current state of the customs of Italians) and his vast Zibaldone di pensieri (Notebooks), written from 1817 to 1832 and first published in 1898. In this remarkable diary he confided his thoughts on a variety of subjects, from linguistics and literature to theoretical and practical philosophy to the theme of national character (in which he was clearly indebted to the writings of Madame de Staël, and particularly to Corinne [1807]), as well as more personal reflections on his own life and feelings.

Central themes of both his prose and poetic writings are the contrast between youthful illusions and hopes and the disappointment and tedium of human existence, the comfort (and pain) of remembering, and nature's indifference to the misery of human beings. Somehaverelated his views to the vicissitudes of his life and especially to his physical ailments and his unfulfilled love life. As it often happens, however, there was much more than just a personal and historical experience at the roots of Leopardi's vision of the human condition. His philosophical outlook was imbued with eighteenth-century materialism and an epistemology based on sensation; his interest in the issue of human happiness was still part of that culture, while his desperation and longing bespeak the climate of early Romanticism and the Restoration.

While he did not reject progress in itself, the skepticism, if not sarcasm, with which he approached both religious fideism and the liberal faith in mankind's "magnificent, progressive destiny" (especially in his 1830–1831 satirical poem "A Supplement to the Battle of the Mice and Frogs") placed him necessarily at odds with many of his contemporaries. However, increasingly from the 1840s onward, he was recognized as a major Italian writer. Vincenzo Gioberti, one of the foremost exponents of Italian Catholic liberalism and nationalism, while rejecting Leopardi's materialism and skepticism, highly praised his poetic works. For some, Leopardi became a symbol of atheism, and as such, he was contrasted to the Catholic Alessandro Manzoni, the "organic" intellectual of Italian conservative liberalism. Others later made him into the symbol of a radical and coherent antiprovidential outlook. In France, Leopardi acquired a considerable reputation thanks to a positive portrait by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1844. The complete collection of his poems was translated into French in 1841. In 1850 William Gladstone made Leopardi's poetic work known to the English public with an appreciative (and moralizing) essay published in the Quarterly Review. Friedrich Nietzsche thought highly of Leopardi's prose writings, reflecting a more general German appreciation for his philological work.

See alsoCarducci, Giosuè; Manzoni, Alessandro; Verga, Giovanni.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Casale, Ottavio M., ed. A Leopardi Reader. Urbana, Ill., 1981.

Francesco, Flora, ed. Zibaldone di pensieri. Milan, 1997.

Rigoni, Mario Andrea, ed. Poesie e prose: Giacomo Leopardi. 2 vols. Milan, 1987.

Secondary Sources

Carpi, Umberto. Il poeta e la politica: Belli, Leopardi, Montale. Naples, 1978.

Celli Bellucci, Novella. G. Leopardi e i contemporanei: Testimonianze dall'Italia e dall'Europa in vita e in morte del poeta. Florence, 1996.

Damiani, Rolando. All'apparir del vero: Vita di Giacomo Leopardi. Milan, 1998.

Dionisotti, Carlo. Appunti su moderni: Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni e altri. Bologna, 1988.

Press, Lynn, and Pamela Williams, eds. Women and Feminine Images in Giacomo Leopardi, 1798–1837: Bicentenary Essays. Lewiston, N.Y., 1999.

Rigoni, Mario Andrea. Il pensiero di Leopardi. Milan, 1997.

Silvana Patriarca