But 1819 was also the year of the most beautiful and most original, certainly the most famous, of Leopardi’s lyric poems, L’infinito (“Infinity”). Unlike the lengthy canzoni he had written before and with which he hoped to make his name, L’infinito is a bare fifteen lines in length, tantalizingly almost a sonnet. In a single gesture, it encompasses memory and the present, the eternal and the passing, the cosmic and the proximate, the subject on the point of the sublime and the subject as submerged, sweetly “foundering.” Leopardi was conscious of a “total change” in his outlook and in himself, and what he had gone through in 1819 is memorably recalled in a famous passage in the notebook (Z 143–44), dated 1 July 1820, and incidentally the precise point at which the pace of writing in the Zibaldone begins to accelerate markedly. In this avowedly autobiographical entry, Leopardi speaks of his passing from a poetry of vivid imagination to a poetry of feeling, a feeling, in the modern way, that requires knowing, because feeling implies conceptualization and reflection. The fact that the distinction between “poet” and “philosopher” is not one of disciplinary specialism, but rather implies a different kind of poetry (and a different way of philosophizing), is amply demonstrated by the poetic output that accompanied the forty-odd months of prodigious reflection that filled the Zibaldone between 1820 and 1823, and again, in a different way, by its creative reworking in the course of 1824. In reality, Leopardi’s poetics evolved rapidly over the years between 1819 and 1823. With the so-called idilli (“idylls,” short lyrics that formally recall some versions of ancient Greek pastoral poetry), written between 1819 and 1821, Leopardi found space for a more personal poetry that could explore states of mind, feelings of loss, memory, sadness and melancholy, with a lightness of touch that he was to theorize as the essential propensity of modern poetry to express the “vague” and the “indefinite.” But in the meantime, the two “patriotic poems” were followed by further important experiments in the canzone genre. In general, the eight new canzoni written between 1820 and 1823 (and first published along with the 1818 poems in Bologna in 1824) preserved the aura of measured regularity that had characterized the two canzoni patriottiche. It was now used, however, to articulate a radical and evolving chain of thought; it had become manifestly a “thinking poetry.” To take but one example, “Bruto minore” (December 1821) staged the titanic rage of Brutus defeated by Mark Antony at the Battle of Philippi (Brutus’s monologue occupies almost the whole poem) against the emptiness of the concept of “virtue” and against the putridi nepoti (“corrupt descendants”) who are destined to follow him. The hollowing-out of virtue, in a bleak and barren landscape, is a substantial devaluation of the natural illusions that Leopardi had seen as so vital and beneficial to the world of antiquity in its proximity to nature. The poem is a high point in a kind of battle that runs through the canzoni written from 1820 to 1822, between the desire to hold on to those illusions and the struggle to find ways of reinventing them in modern poetry.
Both Brutus and Sappho (the protagonist of another great masterpiece of these years, “Sappho’s Last Song,” May 1822), heroes (or antiheroes) of disillusionment, are figures from classical antiquity, and in allowing the rot of civilization to reach these hallowed creatures, Leopardi was signaling the radicalization of his reflection on existence. The progression of this mode of thought can be traced in the pages of the Zibaldone in the period of its most intensive composition, between 1821 and 1823. What Leopardi was now realizing was that there had never been a period in human history when nature was maternally benign and human beings had lived in harmony with it: nature was fundamentally hostile, or at best indifferent. The question that was left open, the tension traced in the canzoni, was whether, even so, all semblance of illusion, ideals, fiction should be abandoned in favor of “the truth,” or whether some remnant of it might still be held on to, particularly in the form of poetry.
The composition in September 1823 of the exquisite Alla sua donna (“To His Lady”) notwithstanding, the possibility of poetry, in the way that he had written it up to now, seemed all but exhausted. Instead, Leopardi turned in 1824 to a project he had long nurtured, the writing of satirical dialogues formally inspired by the model of Lucian and other fantastical prose pieces which would become the twenty Operette morali (“Moral Tales”) written during that year. But the impulse to write what might otherwise have remained one of the many projects that Leopardi left unrealized in the bottom drawer came more probably from his encounter in Rome with a very different writer of dialogues, Plato, and from Leopardi’s subsequent wrestling with, and against, Platonic thought in the high-octane pages of the Zibaldone composed in the summer and autumn of 1823. It was in the Operette that the principal themes worked out in the notebooks over the previous four years, and the new perspectives that he had focalized in the preceding months, would find a suitable “fictional” form, a form in which they could be presented to the public not as dry philosophy, not as a scientific discourse freighted with technicalities and specialist language, but as trains of thought that were approachable and even entertaining, sometimes humorous, in the form of dialogues or fables. There was nothing simplistic, however, about either the ideas or the language in which they were expressed; the language, utterly different from the sort of populist idiom commonly used in early nineteenth-century dialogues, was precise, taut, and syntactically complex—very like that of the Zibaldone, in fact. Like the poems, Leopardi’s prose demanded attention from its reader. In both cases, the author played a risky game. His desire to communicate was (and remained) extremely strong: the repeated initiatives he took to have his work published, the concern with which he followed the stages of publication, his anxiety about the reception of his work were enough to show that Leopardi was no literary recluse. On the other hand, what he wanted to communicate was exactly what he wanted to say (he was aware, too, that how the work appeared affected the communication of its message). On this basis of amicable intransigence Leopardi could hope to engage with his readers on such topics as the futility of the present, the unimportance of human beings in the natural order of things, the impossibility of achieving pleasure, the indifference or hostility of nature to all things human, the supremacy of death over life, the phenomenology of noia, the illusoriness of literary or any other kind of fame, and above all the right of the writer to say things that go against the grain of public opinion or common sense (but which are true). His hopes were not fulfilled: the Operette, like the canzoni before them, were perceived as “difficult.” On 1 August 1827, Stella, his publisher, wrote to the author diplomatically: “I hear your Operette morali spoken well of by everybody, even though Italy is not yet accustomed to that kind of reading matter.” Publication, essential to Leopardi’s sense of himself as a writer, brought with it its inevitable baggage of incomprehension, misunderstanding, distortion, and downright hostility. Perhaps it was no accident that the years in which Leopardi had made his greatest effort toward the public (1824–27) merged quite rapidly into a period of radical withdrawal, one in which he described himself, using the English word, as “absent,” before he began to find a way back again in the later twenties. It is no accident that during these voided years Leopardi devoted himself to the translation of Greek prose writers, notably the Stoically inspired Handbook of Epictetus (1825).
In the summer of 1827, in Florence, Leopardi started the gargantuan task of indexing his Zibaldone, completing it three months later, as he triumphantly announced on 14 October (Z 4295). Not only was he trying to put some order into his unwieldy manuscript, he was of course doing it for a purpose, to see if he could extract from it ideas for future books. Some of the separate files he devised during the same period indicate the kind of scholarly and moral topics that he had in mind (see pp. 2103–10 of this edition). He also began accumulating material for a book of aphorisms that would be published posthumously as Pensieri. In the spring of 1828, now in Pisa, he wrote to his sister, Paolina, that he had started writing poetry again, “in the old way.” The f
irst two poems in this new phase of creativity, apart from the short Scherzo written in February, were both composed in Pisa in April 1828. Il risorgimento (“The Reawakening,” with no political connotations) was written in a style unusual for Leopardi, that of the Arcadian canzonetta, which allowed him to combine a tripping musicality with a measured artifice, as though he were keeping his newly rediscovered feelings at a distance by imposing on himself an external constraint: not dissimilar in kind, if very different in scale, to the systematization of his thoughts through the medium of an index. The poem opens the way to A Silvia (“To Silvia”), the first of a series of stunningly original lyrics that will be composed over the next two years. Before leaving Tuscany, Leopardi spent another summer in the famous reading room established by Giampietro Vieusseux in Palazzo Buondelmonti in Florence, this time making exhaustive notes in the Zibaldone on oral and popular poetic traditions from Homer to contemporary repertoires from Iceland, the Faroes, or the Slav countries and the nations of central Asia (Z 4311ff.). Dry as these compilations from the periodicals of the day may seem, it is difficult not to sense the subterranean connections between them and his own new poetry in the old style, the poems written between 1828 and 1830 (mostly in Recanati on what will be his last return to his hometown), poems such as Le ricordanze (“The Recollections”) and, above all, Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia (“Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia”), that will achieve an unparalleled simplicity of diction combined with exactness of thought and feeling.
As already observed, the writing of the Zibaldone takes place almost entirely in Recanati. And in 1832, after a few desultory pages, it stops. Leopardi keeps it by him, for the rest of his life, and it will remain in the possession of his companion Antonio Ranieri until the latter’s death in 1888. Strangely, the reader of Leopardi suddenly feels bereft. After being accustomed to the luxury of a poetic word (whether in verse or in prose) that is embedded in a tangible, documentable, reproducible humus of reflection and thought, he or she has now to confront the great last poems of the 1830s without such comforts. Of course, that was the situation of all readers of Leopardi before the Zibaldone came to light on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The Zibaldone was a private document, not intended for public consumption, except to the extent that its author wished it to be, in duly altered form. But it is now impossible for any serious reader of Leopardi to do without it. And it is perhaps for this reason, at least in part, that the figure of Leopardi, in the final years of his life, seems more elusive to our grasp. From a biographical point of view, his letters fill part of the gap. We know of his hopeless infatuation for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti in Florence in the early 1830s, and the “Aspasia” cycle of poems of illusion and disillusionment that were supposedly occasioned by it. We know of his close association with the young Neapolitan patriot Antonio Ranieri, with whom and with whose sister (another Paolina) he lived in Naples from the fall of 1833 until his death, and are curious about the nature of this relationship. But, despite Ranieri’s own late memoir (or perhaps because of its frequent evasions and circumlocutions), we have very little sense of Leopardi’s day-to-day existence in a city that he certainly romanticized in his own mind as closer to nature than, say, cultivated Florence, and then went on to denounce as profoundly reactionary. We are struck by the omnipresence of death in the late, Neapolitan, poems: its image in the figure of its victims in the “sepulchre” poems, Sopra un basso rilievo antico and Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna (“On an Ancient Funeral Relief” and “On the Portrait of a Beautiful Woman,” inspired by contemporary sculptures he had seen in Rome, but probably written in 1834–35); the contest between the “thundering womb” of Vesuvius, with Pompeii buried beneath its solidified, echoing lava flow, and the broom plant that asserts its frail vitality by succumbing gently to its fate (La ginestra, “Broom,” 1836); and the setting of the moon, with which “the world goes colorless, / shadows disappear, and one same darkness / falls on hill and valley. / Night is blind…” (Il tramonto della luna, “The Setting of the Moon,” also 1836, ll. 12–15). We can piece together flurries of literary activity, not least the active plan to publish Leopardi’s Works promoted by the bookseller-printer Saverio Starita, which produced the new edition of the Canti in 1835, but was aborted halfway through the publication of the Operette morali because of objections by the censors. And we sense a Leopardi becoming more inclined to comment, usually obliquely, on contemporary affairs, whether through the mock-heroic ottave of the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (1830s) or through the very personalized satire of I nuovi credenti (“The New Believers,” after September 1835), a poem specifically targeted at the Catholic revivalists of Naples, or through hints in the Canti themselves, notably in La ginestra (published posthumously). We seem to be further away from Leopardi in his final years than at any other point in his biography.
Leopardi died in Naples on 14 June 1837, a fortnight before his thirty-ninth birthday. With cholera raging in the city, Ranieri managed to save the body from a common grave and arranged for it to be interred in the church of San Vitale. In 1939 the few remains were transferred to the small park in Piedigrotta (Naples) that is popularly believed to house the tomb of Virgil.
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Ancients and Moderns
A century and a half after the “querelle des anciens et des modernes,” Leopardi, like Rousseau, takes the side of the ancients and strongly repudiates the myth of progress. If the myth of “progress” is nothing but the secularization of Christian eschatology, as Karl Löwith teaches us in Meaning and History (1949)—that is, the expectation of a future perfection—Leopardi returns to the pagan and archaic idea that perfection is given at the beginning and not at the end of our trajectory (he found confirmation of this in the new research concerning Sanskrit during his own lifetime, and see an entry in the 1827 Index: “The corruption and decay of each genre of poetry usually begins immediately after the first work of that genre,” here p. 2094). But far from relegating the notion of perfection to the spheres of myth or the ultrasensory, Leopardi turns it into a concrete datum that can be experienced, even today, in the minds of children. Leopardi considered the ancients to be closer to nature and to our origins, as they are the “children” of the human race; he thus anticipates the nodal point of reflection that, in the footsteps of Freud, would become central to the developmental epistemology of Piaget and of the Neuchâtel school.
Thus, just as man conserves within him traces of childhood as he grows—Leopardi’s poetry, as that of Wordsworth, consists precisely in the recuperation of this originary imprint—civilization itself, as it gradually expands and develops from the south to the north (Z 4256), leaves in its path regions that live according to other times and to past rhythms: “Antiquity itself and the greater naturalness of the ancients is a kind of southernness in time” (Z 4256). This accounts for Leopardi’s interest in ethnography and in travel literature, which parallels his interest in antiquity. For him, as for Ernst Bloch later, contemporaneity is not uniform, but stratified. And it is above all this stratification that Leopardi investigates, never stopping at the surface level. Rather than being thought of as myths, antiquity and nature (and consequently the south and the Orient which coincide with this condition, see Z 625) constitute more properly speaking one polarity that Leopardi assimilates to the oppositional polarities of modern and ancient civilization, with the aim of creating fields of tension that are infinitely variable according to the discourse and the context. Thus the ancient can exist as an enclave within the modern (the “natives,” the wilderness of the Californias), but there can also be the ancient of the modern (as when one identifies a “Risorgimento,” or revival or rebirth); and a modernity of the ancient (for example Plato or Isocrates) as well as a southernism of the north (such as England, see Z 1850).
Leopardi then inserts into the complexity of this analytic structure the pattern of the natural cycle and the periodic seasonal return, based on an agrarian or astrological
imagination (the wheel of Fortune, see Z 2900 and note), as well as an anthropological and historical pattern of progression, according to which the human race, although oscillating between highs and lows in its successive alternations of historical periods, never returns again to the point of departure. In fact, mankind gradually distances itself from nature, and its development assumes a vertiginous acceleration so intense as to render the distance between ancient and modern civilization totally irreversible (Z 163, 4171–72); thus it is impossible to return to the origins “without a miracle” (Z 403). Although Leopardi occasionally utilizes dynamic schemes of a cyclical nature, as do Machiavelli and Vico (Z 403, 867, 3517–18), he clearly distances himself from these earlier thinkers when he underlines the concept of acceleration, which, he maintains, is “of the utmost importance” (Z 1767). And here the door is opened to the “Law of Acceleration” formulated a century later by Henry Adams, and to a critical assessment of modernity that anticipates much of twentieth-century thought. Leopardi never strays from this path, until perhaps the very last years of his life, nor from his desire to intervene actively with the present so as to turn back the hands of the clock of history, in the hope of regenerating a humanity that, by progressing, has lost its original élan (Z 4187).
The keystone of ancient cultures consists above all in the capacity to harbor illusions, and therefore the ability to act in the present. For the ancients (and so too for children and “native peoples”), everything turns on the naive belief in the identity between corporeality and the external world, in the efficacy of action, in the genuineness of expression, because they believed in the objective reality of things: sensations, images, institutions, rituals, and words are real for them, because these apprehensions and practices have not been submitted to the rule of Reason, “the true mother and cause of nothingness” (Z 2942), which destroys the basis of experience. There is no doubt that when Leopardi speaks of the ancients, he is thinking primarily of Greece, or better still, of an archaic Greece, still uncorrupted by Platonic intellectualism. For according to Leopardi, Rome in the first century BCE is already the victim of that excess of civilization and of philosophy that produces the internal barbarism of every people (Z 22, 161, 274), as Brutus and Cicero demonstrate. Such considerations lead to the proposition of a “half-philosophy,” one that might slow down the course of thought (Z 522) and bring humanity back to the threshold that it had crossed after the Platonic turn; back to, that is, a time antecedent to the two fundamental movements of Christianity and of the scientific revolution. These two movements share one essential point: the first exalted the spirit and abstract ideas to the detriment of the body, viewing the phenomenal world as “the enemy of the good” (Z 611–612, anticipating almost to the letter The Gay Science of Nietzsche, § 130), while the second destroyed forever the possibility of believing in a reality underlying the appearance of things.
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