The Poetry of Leopardi by Giacomo Leopardi
"The Poetry of Leopardi" refers to the body of work created by Giacomo Leopardi, an influential Italian poet of the nineteenth century. Recognized as one of the foremost lyricists of European Romanticism, Leopardi shares thematic and stylistic elements with contemporaries such as John Keats and William Wordsworth, although his tone starkly contrasts with that of Wordsworth's optimistic view of nature. Instead, Leopardi's poetry often reflects a bleak and pessimistic outlook, rooted in his own troubled upbringing and health challenges. His lyrical verses, rich with natural imagery, delve into themes of loss, unfulfilled desires, and the inevitability of death, offering a poignant critique of the human condition.
Leopardi's distinctive use of rural scenes and simple idioms underscores a deep sense of nostalgia and existential angst, as seen in works like "To Spring" and "To Sylvia," where he grapples with the fleeting nature of beauty and life. His poetic structure often features the canzone libera, a free verse form that allows for emotional intensity amidst a backdrop of traditional imagery. Through his exploration of love, memory, and suffering, Leopardi invites readers to reflect on the paradox of human existence: the pursuit of joy amidst overwhelming despair. His legacy extends beyond literature, resonating with modern existentialist themes and continuing to influence poets and thinkers alike.
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The Poetry of Leopardi by Giacomo Leopardi
First published:Versi, 1826; Operetti morali, 1827; Canzi, 1831
Critical Evaluation:
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s most distinguished contribution to European Romanticism, was one of the great lyricists of the nineteenth century. Virtually a contemporary of Keats, he demonstrates many similarities to that brilliant, short-lived Englishman. More useful, however, is the comparison with Wordsworth. Like him, Leopardi uses rural scenes and idioms and writes much verse superficially in the same mode. A typical poem of both will begin with a scene rich in natural, simple details, from which the poet weaves both message and mood out of his impression of nature. Nothing could be farther from the divine power in nature that Wordsworth depicts, however, than the bleakly pessimistic mood which is the characteristic impression of a Leopardi lyric. Undoubtedly as a result of his tortured and pathetic childhood, joined to his darker cast of mind, Leopardi’s work is almost anti-Wordsworthian in tone and depicts a welcome although a morbid contrast to other nineteenth century, Romanticists who conventionally, almost mechanically, found in birds and flowers solace from social disappointments. The season of rebirth in Leopardi’s “To Spring” is a thing of irony more than of joy, for the seasons to him merely remind one of the irrevocable coming of eternal winter. Though “fragrant spring breathes upon the frozen heart” now, soon the ice of death and disintegration will descend upon man, creating a stillness that no spring will ever touch. This same lyric contrasts the lost world of classical Greece, in which the world seemed to live in dynamic rapport with the divine in myth and legend, with the world of today, where “blind thunder” wanders over the valley and the rain falls on good and evil alike. The poet concludes by asking the spirit of nature to affirm that there is a divinity even though the deity be but a “pitiless” spectator of meaningless comings and goings.
Undoubtedly Leopardi’s remarkable but pathetic upbringing had much to do with the bitterness and sadness of his verse. The lonely, brilliant child of ambitious but stodgy parents, his intellect was recognized at an early age, but was then pressured by his family at a terrible rate. At fifteen he could both read and write Greek, but at eighteen he was broken in body and spirit, with eyes permanently damaged, spine prematurely crooked by extraordinary intellectual endeavor, and mind keenly suffering as well. Renouncing classical scholarship through necessity as well as conviction, Leopardi turned to creative literature almost as therapy. As D. H. Lawrence would affirm later about himself, he seemed to shed his illnesses of body and spirit in books.
Too much Leopardi at one sitting is as overwhelming to the reader as Leopardi’s life must have been to the poet, but taken in selections his creations have a spirit that helps fill out the literature of European Romanticism with a sad beauty too rarely found in others of the period. In “Memories” the poet sits before the open window and looks at the stars, but such an experience intensifies bitterness more than it dissipates it. Memories flood of his lost boyhood when he had his health and hope, when the stars beckoned instead of glittering coldly and mindlessly. “My heart never told me,” he thinks, how “my green age” would be wasted here in “the barbarous town, with a cheap boorish people.” The bell that once gave meaning to the day now mocks it; now only death awaits to alleviate the barren dullness of days without hope or love. Then the poet speaks of the loss in death of Nerina, who is another image of the bright past now gone. Here, and again in “To Sylvia,” Leopardi creates something akin to Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, but with the ubiquitous Leopardi difference. For Wordsworth, the death of Lucy is somehow made acceptable through the natural world that took her back but is given life through her death. No such reconciliation is possible for Leopardi, who finds nothing beyond the bare bones of death. The death of Sylvia, like the passage of spring and youth, is another reminder of the deception nature practices on men:
Sylvia, do you still recall
Love is another unfulfilled promise, a dream to die, and Sylvia’s hand bares the only truth, “a bare sepulchre.” These poems represent the Romantic lyric tradition in their use of sexual motifs, but they also undoubtedly reflect the frustration of Leopardi’s few but intense and all unrequited love affairs, about which his close friend and biographer, Antonio Ranieri, tells. Physically blighted, keenly sensitive and shy, Leopardi found sexuality only another realm in which man could suffer the cruelties of indifferent fate and ineluctable mortality.
But from the bitter fruit came a wine of lyricism that has its own truth as well as its own beauty. In a prose dialogue between Tasso and his familiar spirit, Leopardi’s version of Tasso says that man generally oscillates in a tedium between pleasure and pain, but pleasure is wholly a delusion about which he dreams but never achieves. So he lives largely in tedium, which is the true passion that fills his existence. Later this quality will be Baudelaire’s ennui and to the modern, spiritual alienation, in which intelligent man suffers from the knowledge of that unbridgeable gap between hope and reality, and from the inevitable angst that such knowledge brings. What remedy can there be for tedium? So Tasso asks his dream visitor. “Sleep, opium and pain,” the spirit replies. And pain is the only relief, for through suffering man fully knows perhaps all the truth of life he is capable of possessing. This insight is a key to Leopardi’s aesthetic, as well as being a virtual axiom for the existentialist writers of today, with whom Leopardi has strong though archaic affinity.
The famous lyric “The Broom, or the Flower of the Desert,” written in Ranieri’s house on the slope of Vesuvius a few months before Leopardi’s death at thirty-nine, is one of his finest achievements in his paradoxical poetry of bitter lyricism. In this flower, which blooms brilliantly but briefly on the side of the volcano that destroyed it before and will destroy it again, Leopardi found the perfect image for men’s brief but brilliant hopes that are closed at either end by darkness. In nineteenth century fashion, Leopardi uses this image to begin and end a long poem that comments upon both nature and society.
Here on the naked back
The flower is expanded into a symbol of Pompeii. Then Leopardi, as bleak in vision as Hardy, notes how “loving Nature” cares here for her own and calls us to witness here “the magnificent progressive destiny of Humankind” as well. (Such sentiments as these account for Leopardi’s appeal to James Thomson, who translated Leopardi into English and echoed him in the bitter philosophy contained in his “city of Dreadful Night,” that overlong and turgid but occasionally powerful poem of the modern city of unalive men, surrounded by the wasteland that is our spiritual landscape.) Nature has no more care for man than for the ants, and she pours her lava, her dissolution, upon man and all his projects. In a similar mood Leopardi then discourses upon nineteenth century liberalism, prophesying, as Joseph Conrad did later, that the very men crying now for liberty will enslave others who oppose their version of it. Yet the pathetic but perennial broom blooms anyway, like man who, born to perish and reared in pain, ludicrously persists in saying, “I was born for joy.”
Leopardi’s most characteristic verse form is the canzone libera, a stanza largely of blank verse, but punctuated at select moments of intensity with short, rhymed intervals. Though he has a mastery of traditional imagery and diction, he strives for idiomatic simplicity. (His knowledge of classical literature gave him a command of ancient culture more profound than that of almost any other nineteenth century poet. At eighteen he wrote an imitation Greek ode to Neptune that was accepted as genuine by many scholars of his day.) His use of villagers, peasant settings, and rural scenes fulfill the aim he set forth in his famed essay on Mme. de Stael’s Germanic Romanticism, when he called upon Italy’s young poets to cultivate their own customs, their own scenes, their own folklore and leave those of the Germans to the North. This essay became a manifesto of nationalistic Italian literature, thus giving him a revered place in his country’s nineteenth century radical spirit, like Byron’s in England and Hugo’s in France, despite the quite bleak character of Leopardi’s beautiful but dark lyrics.